Nobody by Marc Lamont Hill

Author:Marc Lamont Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

VI.

Emergency

Flint, Michigan, is a city of roughly one hundred thousand people located in Genesee County, just sixty miles north of Detroit. In the middle of the twentieth century, Flint was at the heart of the nation’s thriving car industry—a past admired by its residents, as seen in the “Vehicle City” sign on the arch that spans Saginaw Street, the city’s main artery. Statues mounted here honor some of America’s greatest auto pioneers: Louis Chevrolet, David Dunbar Buick, Albert Champion, and William C. “Billy” Durant. It was in Flint where Durant, determined to unite early car manufacturers, founded General Motors. While he eventually went bankrupt, Alfred P. Sloan first emerged to steer GM to success, making it the largest corporation in the world by 1953. The people of Flint—and there were twice as many of them back then as there are now1—were prosperous beneficiaries of this growth. At one point, it could be said that Flint was so tied to GM that 80 percent of its population participated in the company’s success.2

Today, however, that rosy history is little more than a memory. Beginning in the 1980s, GM fell on hard times. Facing stiff competition from manufacturers in the Far East, the company, which once inspired the slogan “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation,” evolved into more of a financial-services operation than a carmaker.3 Commanding a smaller share of the auto market and desperate to cut labor costs, GM soon began shuttering many of its Michigan operations. By 1987, this drawdown included “Fisher One,” the imposing GM body plant, site of the historic 1937 sit-down strike that established the United Auto Workers as a formidable management foe.4

As GM went, so went the city of Flint, which entered into an economic decline that persists to this day. In 1989, Flint native Michael Moore scored big with Roger and Me, a wry documentary built around his unsuccessful efforts to meet with then GM chairman Roger Smith and make him answer for the effects of layoffs on Flint’s residents. Moore reprised his visit to Flint for his 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, in which, in addition to mocking the saber-rattling of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” he trailed Marine recruiters as they approached out-of-work Flint teens, most of them Black, and unsuccessfully tried to get them to join the fight.5

At the time of Roger and Me, GM employed approximately fifty thousand workers, down from eighty thousand at its peak. Today it has 7,200.6 About 40 percent of Flint’s residents now live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate, which peaked at 20 percent during the financial and auto industry crises of 2008, has made only a modest recovery, hovering stubbornly around 10 percent throughout 2015.7 While GM recently declared an investment of $877 million in its sole remaining Flint assembly plant, it was greeted here as a hollow victory since the company also said that their investment would add no new jobs.8

The vicissitudes of the modern, global, postindustrial economy certainly contributed to Flint’s woes (more on that later).

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