Turn out the lights, Michigan

With unemployment the worst in the nation, and the government on the verge of shutdown, it's time for my home state to drive toward a new way of life.

By Edward McClelland

Read more: Labor, Opinion, Michigan

Sept. 28, 2007 | It's a piece of Michigan lore that belongs right up there with Pere Marquette dying in the wilderness, or Berry Gordy discovering the Supremes.

Summer of 1972. Flint. A young man was manning a gas pump when a General Motors executive drove up.

"Why aren't you working in the shop?" asked the driver, whose company was desperate for strong arms to build GM's armada of Buick Electras and Cadillac Fleetwoods.

The pump jockey shrugged, so the recruiter took down his number. A week later, the kid was dragooned into service as an autoworker, the most enviable blue-collar occupation in the world. He had "more health insurance than Evel Knievel could piss away in a million bus jumps," as Flintoid Ben Hamper put it in his darkly hilarious shoprat memoir, "Rivethead." And in 30 years, he could retire on full benefits, with enough money to open a motorcycle detailing shop or buy a fishing lodge Up North. That's why the company was nicknamed "Generous Motors."

This week's United Auto Workers strike seemed like an act of nostalgia for those days. It was the first walkout against GM since 1970, and its central demand -- more job security -- asked the company to restore a promise it hasn't been able to keep for over a generation. It was merely the latest in a long, relentless and accelerating series of signs that my home state, at least as I knew it, is circling the drain.

When I was growing up in Lansing, Mich., in the 1970s, General Motors was the largest private employer in the world. Lansing was the birthplace of the Oldsmobile, and the model's logo glowed in pink neon script above the Grand River plant. (The river below also glittered in unnatural colors.) The United Auto Workers numbered 1.5 million -- three times its current strength -- and the whole city knew when Local 652 was electing a new president, because the candidates bought airtime on the radio.

My high school, J.W. Sexton, was across the street from GM's Fisher Body assembly plant. The air we breathed was suffused with the chemical tang of atomized paint. And facing every gate was a tavern or a party store, for post-shift beer runs. The school and the shop seemed like part of a unified industrial complex. Sexton produced students, who grew up to produce cars.

By the time I started high school, that link in the process had been severed. It was 1982, the rock-bottom pits of the Rust Belt recession. Auto work was not my class's calling. Our chemistry teacher, Mr. Deslich, began each semester with this warning: "They used to say there was a tunnel from the graduation stage to Fisher Body. That's not there anymore. You can't count on a job in the plant. You're going to have to study and go to college."

It was wise advice. At its peak, in the late 1970s, "The General" enlisted 600,000 hourly workers. Today, it's down to 73,000. So where do you work if you blew off high-school chem? Well, Wal-Mart is now the world's largest employer.

The Oldsmobile nameplate has been stripped from GM's roster. You have to go to Lansing's R.E. Olds Museum to see one. Fisher Body is being torn down, by a company with the Big Brother-ish slogan "Demolition Means Progress." Sexton's student body is half what is was when I graduated, and in the surrounding neighborhood, you can see an abandoned elementary school, and aluminum bungalows tagged with repo stickers.

My best friend from high school still lives in Lansing. He repairs lottery machines. It's one of the more secure jobs in town.

"When people are out of work," he says, "we get more business."

The UAW strike was just one distressing headline in a week of bad economic news for Michigan. As usual, the state has the nation's highest unemployment rate -- 7.2 percent. (In 2005, it was the only state not hit by a hurricane to lose jobs. It regularly wins United Van Lines' title of most-fled state, and the state of Wyoming put up a billboard outside Flint to lure workers west. That's a reversal of Henry Ford's old practice of sending his agents to wander the South handing out free one-way train tickets to Detroit.) On Friday, thousands of state employees will be told whether to report to work next week. Thanks to obstinate Republicans in the state Legislature and an ineffectual Democratic governor, Michigan may not meet its Oct. 1 budget deadline. The governor wants to raise taxes. Republican legislators want to freeze school funding and cut social services. If they can't agree soon, the state government will shut down. Drivers have been warned to renew their license plates now. The state police won't patrol the roads, and even the casinos will close.

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