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Rehired: Tom Van Meer, 30, works on the line again at Lear Seating in Romulus. He hopes this time the job will last.Hopes dashed, lives rebuilt when jobs die
Lear layoffs illustrate struggles of thousands
Going Under: Marc and Angela Strong sign bankruptcy papers at their lawyer's office in Dearborn Heights. "We're short $1,500 a month on bills," says Marc Strong, 29.
Michigan's economy is at a crossroads. The manufacturing sector is shrinking, the auto industry faces greater competition and high-paying technology jobs are being shipped abroad. Today, The Detroit News kicks off a series on the state of the Michigan economy. The periodic special reports will probe the impact of structural economic changes roiling Michigan, study job trends and examine the future of the state's economy.
Career changes
Have you been forced to cope with drastic change in you career? Please share your advice for getting through it.
Fresh start: Scott Caldwell, with nurse Laura Wojtkowicz, above, says returning to school and scraping by on unemployment for two years is a worthy trade-off for job security.
Still working: Mark Clark assembles seating at Lear One, which hired 104 of the 328 workers laid off in 2001.
Moving on: Tamara Goudeaux-Stanley, right, a veteran factory worker, is now getting A's in college as she dreams of becoming a caterer.
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In a bright room smelling slightly of disinfectant, a nervous Scott Caldwell starts over.
At 36, he is at least a decade older than his fellow student nurses at Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn, and his resume is more grit than grades. He’s built boat trailers and car seats along Metro Detroit’s assembly lines, earning good pay while keeping the region’s economy buzzing one bolt at a time.
The hire date Caldwell scribbles on his hospital employment form — Dec. 29, 2003 — is more than two years after he and 327 others lost their jobs at Lear Seating. For 27 months, the Taylor resident scraped by on unemployment benefits while attending school, awaiting the day he could again feel secure in his job.
“Three years ago, I thought I’d put in my 30 years at Lear and retire,” Caldwell said. “Now, I just want a job I know will be there in 30 years.”
The workers of Lear Plant Two are among the almost 150,000 Michigan residents who have lost factory jobs since January 2001. Many of those jobs aren’t coming back, economists say. The state economy and its workers must reinvent themselves.
It is in the modest homes and tired bodies of former factory workers that the reinvention begins. At Lear, some found other factory work, but the majority did not. Today, among Lear’s former workers are police officers, surgical technicians and chefs.
Many remain unemployed, and almost all earn less than when the doors closed behind them at Lear. There have been lost homes and lost marriages, and questions about the American Dream.
The plant closing barely made the newspapers. In the state’s shrinking manufacturing sector, a Lear Seating, in effect, closes every 2 1/2 days. But the choices made by the former workers of this shuttered auto supplier reflect the pitfalls and hopes of thousands like them, and a state economy facing the same tough choices.
Managers herded the day shift workers into the cafeteria of Lear Seating Plant Two in Romulus for a meeting the morning of Oct. 12, 2001. We’ll pay you for today’s shift, managers said. Go home. The plant is closed.
Seating plants are the canaries of the auto industry, suffering layoffs and closings at the whiff of an economic downturn. Because of their bulk, and because they are built on a just-in-time schedule, seats must be built close to the assembly plants where they will be bolted into cars. Rom Two, as workers called the Lear plant, made seats for the Mercury Cougar and Ford Windstar.
Employees often worked 60 hours a week to keep up with demand. But in 2001, the factory became a victim of changing consumer tastes and terrorism.
The Cougar was being discontinued because of poor sales. The Windstar line was moving to a factory in Windsor, near the assembly plant where the vans were assembled. For years, the seats were shuttled across the Ambassador Bridge. Added security after September 11 made just-in-time delivery across the international border difficult.
Management notified workers months earlier that the plant was likely to close. That only added fuel to the rumors swirling around the factory floor. One day, workers would talk excitedly of a contract for truck seats that would save their jobs; the next, they’d be certain they were receiving their last paycheck. The morning it became official, Charlene Van Meer recalls a numb acceptance among her co-workers, as if a long-ill family member had passed away.
Van Meer had a sister, an uncle and a cousin at Ford. Her husband, Tom Van Meer, also a Lear employee, had a father and an uncle at General Motors. Many at Lear were second- and third-generation auto workers accustomed to riding out the ups and downs of the industry. But that day, Charlene Van Meer saw something in her co-workers’ eyes she’d never seen.
Fear.
Scott Caldwell walked out of Lear after the meeting, not knowing when or where he’d work again. “I have no skills. Anybody can push a screw into a metal seat,” Caldwell said. “My God, what do I do now?”
Two years of pain
In some ways, the workers of Rom Two were lucky. They knew months in advance that their plant was likely to close. Because production of Windstar seats moved to Canada, the workers qualified for generous retraining benefits through the North American Free Trade Agreement. And in the two years since the closing, Lear has offered the vast majority of them at least temporary jobs at other Lear plants.
Yet 27 months since most workers lost their jobs (about 60 worked until August 2002), many still suffer financially.
Most of the 328 employees of Rom Two made $17.61 an hour plus generous overtime in the fall of 2001. Today, those who have returned to factory life earn more than they did; those who haven’t, make less.
Of the 328 employees, 104 work at an adjacent Lear factory making automobile seats, earning about $19 an hour, according to Lear.
A vast majority — 90 percent — of 140 former Rom Two workers contacted by The Detroit News who did not return to Lear earn less money than they did two years ago. About 44 percent are unemployed — more than six times the state jobless rate.
“You can’t help but empathize with them,” said Chuck Batt, trade program coordinator at the Downriver Community Conference, a Southgate organization that coordinated retraining benefits for Rom Two workers. “They’re re-entering the workforce starting at the bottom,” Batt said. “These are long-term employees. It’s a gut-wrenching experience.”
More than 60 Rom Two workers completed training programs or college degrees. Most believe it will pay off someday. But for many, that day has not yet arrived.
Dinosaurs, diggers
The arithmetic of Marc Strong’s new life is kept in neat, manila folders.
There is the house file, with mortgage and second mortgage balances totaling $120,000, more than the small Lincoln Park home with peeling paint and a furnace on the fritz is worth.
There is the credit card file: $24,000 on various cards; two cars, total owed $18,000; wife Angela’s student loans, totaling $50,000.
The couple filed for bankruptcy Wednesday, and the bank is foreclosing on their home.
“We’re short $1,500 a month on bills,” Strong said. “We thought I’d get a decent job. Then, unemployment ran out.”
Strong is a big man, 29 years old with a crew cut and a Detroit Pistons jersey. He proudly calls himself a “third-generation factory rat” who grew up to the rhythm of Detroit’s assembly lines. Attending the North American International Auto Show in past years, he’d raise a beefy arm above the crowd and point to a leather bucket seat in a Ford Mustang.
“I’d say, ‘I may have built that seat,’ ” Strong said, smiling.
After the plant closed, Strong went to school for a year to become a massage therapist, only to discover “nobody wants a massage from a big guy with kids.” He delivered pizzas, built automobile clutches at an Auburn Hills factory for $9.50 an hour, and refilled ATMs for $9.25 an hour. Strong spends his days searching for his personal holy grail: a union-pay auto assembly job.
He’s filled out so many applications and taken so many drug screens, his left arm remains tender from needle pricks.
“I know the economy is in the dumps and it’s cheaper to make it someplace else,” Strong said. “But I deserve my chance for the American Dream.”
Strong still believes in the dream of his parents and grandparents, the dream of talking sports with the guys on the line while Cougar seats roll past forever; pocket money for pizza and movies; maybe someday a cabin up north. It was the promise of Detroit’s blue-collar middle class, nurtured in break rooms from River Rouge to Warren.
Last week, he found a job in Warren making truck seats for Ford. The pay: $10.50 an hour.
“This country was built on hard work,” he said. “Maybe I am a dinosaur. But the world needs ditch diggers, too. Here I am now, wishing I was back in the factory.”
Time to go back?
It was a $100,000 question: Did Tom and Charlene Van Meer want jobs back at Lear?
The Wayne couple struggled financially after Rom Two closed. Tom Van Meer took a job laying tile, but they were still going into the red by almost $2,000 a month. “We just couldn’t pay our bills,” Tom said. “She cashed in stock, and I took out a 401(k) loan.”
Both received calls offering jobs at Rom One. They’d be doing the same work they did at Rom Two, for similar pay. With one call, one syllable shouted into the phone, their income could go from zero to $100,000.
But saying yes wasn’t easy. An auto job was a love affair they knew would end badly: the seduction of money, but the gnawing fear that, in the end, they would be jilted.
Tom, 30, wanted to go back. “There’s a comfort factor there,” he said. “I know how to build seats.”
He knew he could lose his job again. But how could he justify to his kids turning down that kind of money? Maybe the job would last this time. Maybe they’d just had bad luck before, and now it was their turn to be lucky.
But Charlene felt lucky to be away from Lear. The pneumatic drills made her hands ache so much that she had trouble opening a jar of peanut butter for her children. The fabric she stretched across the seats dried out her hands so much that she had to soak them in ice water.
The 39-year-old enjoyed her new job as a massage therapist. But the pay, about $300 every two weeks, is what she could earn weekly in overtime alone at the plant.
The couple decided Tom would go back to Lear, and Charlene would keep her part-time job as a massage therapist. It was a decision that cost the family about $40,000 a year.
“Christmas would have been better,” Tom said.
“You’d have your new truck by now,” Charlene said.
“We’d have something in savings,” Tom said.
The couple was silent for a long moment.
“We could be better off financially, but in the long run, this is for the best,” Tom said. “Who’s to say, five years from now, I could get laid off again.”
New life, new troubles
There are days when the hum of the factory calls to Scott Caldwell, days when he’s studying physiology alone while his old buddies play poker; days when he curses his rotten credit rating and his bankruptcy.
How easy it would be to drive bolts into metal all day, collect a fat paycheck and go home, like his father did before him, like most of his friends do today.
“There were a lot of days when I wasn’t real sure I’d make it,” Caldwell said. “It’s hard to start over. I’m 36 years old. I’ve been working for 18 years.”
After leaving Lear, the ex-Marine researched careers on the Internet.
“Right now, there’s such a huge shortage of nurses, I don’t think I could have picked a better field to go into,” Caldwell said.
Many didn’t have the choice. Some felt they were too old to start a new career. Others were the sole breadwinners in their homes and, unable to survive on about $300 a week they received on unemployment, took whatever work they could find.
“Luckily, I had a wife who was working (as a AAA customer service representative),” Caldwell said.
Soon after the plant closed, the couple sat with a calculator at the kitchen table, figuring their income and expenses. If Scott went to school, it would be tight, but they believed they could make it.
They were wrong. Bills piled up. They took cash advances on their credit cards to pay the mortgage.
The couple declared bankruptcy last year.
“Right now, we can’t finance an orange,” Caldwell said.
He began a job as a student nurse at Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn last month. He makes $15 an hour, enough to pay bills until he becomes a registered nurse. That was supposed to happen this spring. But Caldwell dropped a class he feared he’d flunk.
If he passes next time, he’ll become a registered nurse in May 2005.
It seems far off, but looking down the corridor of the cardiac care unit, the factory seems even farther away.
“It’s not the same here,” he said. “It feels like ... I’m accomplishing something.”
New rumors swirl
Rumors are swirling again around the former workers of Rom Two. Some say Lear is preparing to open another line at Rom One, meaning more will be given a chance to return to factory life. Others hear that the new jobs they have at Lear may not last.
Andrea Puchalsky, communications director at Lear, hears the rumors. Her telephone in the corporate offices in Southfield rings daily with calls from employees and former employees, some voices filled with the hope, others with fear.
You can reach Ron French at (313) 222-2175 or rfrench@detnews.com
New career: Charlene Van Meer, with children Kailia and Zachary and mother Marie Stephens, now works as a massage therapist, making $300 every two weeks. Her husband, Tom, chose to go back to work at Lear.
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