The dozen GM Cranston retirees sit four to a yellow vinyl booth, like passengers on a train, craning their necks to join in the conversation from the other booths. The row of tables next to the booths fills quickly with the other dozen old men who are joining them. They are survivors, appreciative of the resilience of the human liver, or cognizant by now of the importance of good genes. They have made it through the gauntlet of workplace injuries and diseases, boredom, mental and physical fatigue, and emerged in retirement.
As a group, their aura is gray, born of their thirty, forty, fifty years of daily immersion in oil mist, grinding dust, and welder smoke. The heat treat man has a red leathery face from his decades of leaning over two thousand degree oven pits. The press operators sit calmly like well-trained dogs, as if the bondage to the press lines still exists, and they are awaiting orders from either the boss or the movement of parts toward them. The die makers wear porous faces turned pallid from the daily barrage of abrasive materials.
The talk is of the upcoming interview with Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, and Ron Gettelfinger, the United Auto Workers International President. The retirees continually glance at the television hung on the lime green wall at the end of the seating area, as if their future hangs with it. They are watching the financial channel, CNBC. The ticker line displays the current value of GM stock, at its lowest valuation in fifty years. Toyota could write a check for $2.5 billion and own the whole mess—all the hundreds of factories around the world, along with the name brands of Chevrolet, GMC, Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, and Saturn. Later in the day will be the Easter Egg Hunt on the front lawn of the plant, the last scheduled joint activity to be hosted by the local entities of General Motors and the United Auto Workers. No matter that it is November—hundreds of children will dash across the front lawn one last time, scooping up plastic eggs filled with prize certificates from local merchants who, one more time, had coughed up tens of thousands of dollars for the annual Easter Egg Hunt.
The men had stood on picket lines together, carried their wounded and dead out of the jumble of press lines on stretchers, and worked uncountable hours of overtime to get through model changeover in the heyday of GM. These old men would go out to the plant and watch the grandchildren that were their legacies, the flesh and blood that had commanded their bondage to rows of machinery most of their adult lives, scurry after plastic Easter egg prizes.
The ticker crawls across the bottom of the screen as CNBC’s announcer somberly yet cheerfully recounts the demise of the American auto giant. The men watch the symbols of stocks they once owned or now own through their retirement accounts—all, it seems, worth only a small fraction of what they paid for them. The stock market did not treat any of them well, though it is something they do not talk about. None of them would publicly admit that they had been hoodwinked by a government and economic elite that had convinced all of America to put its money in the stock market to be harvested as fast as human gullibility would allow by the day-trading experts on Wall Street. None of them would admit to faring any worse than “breaking even” in the stock market, though most of them had lost ninety per cent of their retirement savings.
Bob Elliot enters the diner, and the men at the tables begin shuffling their chairs to make room for the man. Bob was the manager of the Cranston plant for twenty years after John Dunham was promoted in the late seventies. He guided the plant through the tumult of the eighties and was considered the reason for the plant’s longstanding success. Elliot had planned to stay in Cranston only a couple of years before being promoted to GM vice-president, but some things happened which pitted him against the top brass—mainly, after the two years in Cranston, he was told that his ticket to Detroit would be shutting down the plant. He told them to go to hell, and dug in and fortified the Cranston plant, pulling in all his favors from around the country to increase the workload and job security at his plant. In short, he declared war against the GM system. And it had worked until his retirement ten years ago. Only now, thirty years after it first tried, was GM successful in shutting down his beloved plant.
“Hey, Bob,” calls one retiree, and the others give their greetings or nod to this man they all respect. There had not been a constant union/management problem during the years that Bob ran the plant. He made it clear through his actions that he was one of them—if they failed, they would all fail together, all go down together. When all was said and done, Bob was a working man like they were.
Then Wagoner and Gettelfinger are on the TV. “We are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Wagoner begins. “The next one hundred days will determine if we survive. Sales are down nearly fifty per cent since gas prices doubled and the Wall Street bailout began. We need a short term loan…if we can pledge a trillion dollars to the banking industry, we think it is fair that we are loaned this money….”
The CNBC announcer interrupts, “Why should we give you any money? Foreign car makers are doing okay in the south.”
“They were subsidized by the states,” Gettelfinger says.
“Isn’t that how it works?”
“When tax abatements first started in the 70’s, the UAW warned of their consequences,” the union president continues.
“Isn’t the truth of the matter that GM has been mismanaged?”
“You know better than that,” Wagoner says. The jaw muscles tighten in his face. Just once he would like to tell these people what was what. Sure, mistakes had been made….
“Aren’t your labor agreements the problem?” the announcer asks.
“No, no, no,” Gettelfinger answers. “Labor amounts to ten per cent of the vehicle cost. Our government looked the other way when foreign governments manipulated their currencies to gain market share in America. It was our own government that sold GM out with NAFTA….”
“Sorry, we’re out of time,” the guy on CNBC bellows. “Ladies and gentlemen, Rick Wagoner from GM and Ron Gettelfinger from the UAW. Thanks for being here.”
“Turn that shit off,” one of the guys hollers. Then the waitress is bringing their eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. They eat in silence, the impending bankruptcy of their company and the end of their retirement pay and benefits looming. There are a few attempts at humor or reviving a story or two from the old days, but nothing takes hold.
When the waitress brings the checks, the heat treat man grabs the plant manager’s. “Your money’s no good here today, Bob.” In a few minutes they have paid their bills and filed out of the restaurant, where a few of them linger in the parking lot.
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