Punching Out One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

Author:Paul Clemens
Format: mobi

I’d told Matt the day before that I’d be in around 7:30 in the morning to see the crown of 16-1 come down. How long would it take? “If everything goes real well, two hours,” he said.

It took longer than that simply to set up. I sat on an I-beam on the shop floor and doodled in my notebook, drawing what I saw. During dull stretches in the plant—there were plenty such—I sometimes pretended that I was a location scout who had just stumbled upon the ideal setting for a dystopian film set in the postapocalyptic near future. If Ridley Scott ever decided to film a Blade Runner sequel, I knew a place.

“There’s never a need to be in a big hurry,” Matt said. “This shit takes time.”

It was a Sunday morning, and I had missed Mass to witness the crown coming down. I wandered around the plant to kill time. I’d long since learned not to kick any of the junk—bolts, nuts, screws, bits of this and that—with which the shop floor was cluttered. You found that items that looked light didn’t budge when nudged by the end of your foot. Without boots, you’d have had a badly stubbed toe, if not a broken metatarsal. I kicked bolts that felt like fifty-pound dumbbells. After a time, you learned to step over and around most everything.

On one of my wanderings, I’d picked up a discarded set of “commitments” signed by the twenty-five Budd Detroit press shop workers who had been part of the 16-line “natural working group.” In the Budd cafeteria there was a ThyssenKrupp poster—“Natural Work Groups: The Power to Secure Our Future”—that showed all hands in, as in a football huddle. In honor, I presumed, of Krupp, some patriot had penned in a swastika.

Seeing such corporate claptrap in a closed plant was a little like looking at a deceased person’s to-do list. What’s the point, you wonder, when it’s all bound to end anyway? Framed as a set, the four 16-line “commitments” were signed by all twenty-five members of the natural working group. The commitments were to “Group Purpose,” “Vision,” “Goals and Objectives,” and “Standards/Norms/Expectations.”

The workers were simply parroting the plant’s German parents. I’d sometimes snatch up a stray bit of company correspondence from the plant floor and read what I could stomach. From the Handbuch “THYSSENKRUPP BEST:” “Against the background of a visibly weakening world economy … It is vital to identify internal value-adding potential … This corporate value-enhancement program takes an integrated approach with a self-supporting dynamic to achieve a sustainable increase in value … The success of ‘ThyssenKrupp best’ is very much in the interests of the workforce: only a successful company can offer its employees secure and challenging jobs with good prospects.” And, here, there, everywhere, the ThyssenKrupp letterhead: “Das Beste. Von uns. Für uns.”

In the cafeteria, where windows were broken and playing cards still sat on a tabletop, there was another ThyssenKrupp poster still attached to the wall. Its title was “Quality Attitude.” The poster was divided into two columns.

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