Detroit and Class Warfare.

I’ve already written about how I grew up in Detroit and what it was like in the fifties and sixties. I can’t really tell you much about the fifties since I was just a kid first trying to figure out what the heck was going on with this life thing. I did go to a freshly built elementary school three or four blocks from my home and my class size was around twelve or fifteen. It really was a neighborhood school. In 1963 I went to a newly built junior high school that was still within walking distance. I do remember the sixties – albeit with some foggy time toward the end of the decade, but that’s another story – and Detroit was hoppin’ and poppin’ – at least on my white ass side of town.

I grew up right in the middle of square miles of working class families and we were solidly middle class. One of my friends’ father worked in mid-management for Chrysler, and another friend’s father sold Chevys. My uncle Eddie worked forty-five years for Ford. He retired with a good pension and lived a long life. Sometime around World War II my mother worked for Fisher Body. Later she worked for the National Bank of Detroit whose biggest customer was General Motors. She once told me about having to track down a million dollars of GM money. That’s when I first learned that the rich see money differently than the rest of us.

In ’69 I worked for Ford for a couple of months in the summer. I worked at the Rouge Complex at the stamping plant. We put together all the sheet metal that went into cars, operating huge machines that shaped and cut the steel or spot welders that put pieces together. I had to join the UAW and they took forty dollars out of my first check for union dues. I was paid 3.47 an hour – that would be seventeen something today. The next year I worked at a machine shop five minutes from my home that made parts for Chrysler, the quintessential small business interface to the auto industry. It was non-union and I got 2.50 an hour – or about twelve something now. Notice that jobs were available and they paid rather decently.

My brother worked for Ford after he got out of the Navy while he went to college and law school. He worked testing electronic components. Did you ever see the movie Class Action? It stars Gene Hackman. Fred Thompson makes a cameo, kind of like he did in Hunt for Red October. He explains how a company knew about a problem but that the beancounters, the company accountants, ran the numbers and saw that it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits later then have a recall to make the cars safe. My brother worked for the unit that informed Ford of the problem that the movie references.

This is what has gone wrong with American business over my lifetime. The beancounters got control and dictate to the rest of us. The executives have the power and they wield it ruthlessly. Heartless, they care nothing for the pain they cause thousands and thousands of families. They have made millions and millions off the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers, the ones that actually do the work of designing and building cars. Scumbags like Roger Moore (Roger of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me), Henry Ford III, and Lee Iacocca literally destroyed Detroit as heads of the Big Three, yet they made themselves richer. It’s the same aristocratic attitude that our forefathers had a revolution over.

I left Detroit in 1973, and my parents did in 1975 when my father retired. By 1980 when I returned to Detroit to bury my father, I was shocked to see how badly the city had been devastated. The executives made millions, the workers got screwed.

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