End of the Road

I am a proud member of Generation Y, and as someone who also grew up in Detroit, I can say that I experienced first-hand the high water mark of American labor. In other words, I experienced first-hand what good, fair wages and benefits could mean for American families. Not only did wages earned by factory workers from the late '40s through the late '70s allow families to raise their brood in homes that they would come to own, free and clear of debt, manufacturing jobs allowed families to put money away for the future and even for vacations and family outings. As quiet as it is kept, life in Detroit in the time period of my youth was good. I say this without qualification.

Ben Austen's article, "End of the Road: After Detroit: the Wreck of an American Dream" is an important one. Austen isn't just lamenting the decline of the American middle class and its short-lived standard, he gently uncovers the manner by which it happened. For me, his was a short article; it could have been a book. And there are books that do the job that Austen does not do here: Thomas Sugrue's The Origin of the Urban Crisis (1996) and Steve Babson's Working Detroit (1986). Austen deals gently with this subject I think because he knows his audience cannot understand the message of decline in any other way. As he points out, Georgetown, Kentucky was happy to get the Toyota plant; citizens of this city were undoubtedly both ecstatic that jobs were coming to their town and that they had beat out all of the other cities that had competed for this prize. After all, the late twentieth century was a time of such competition, Southerners, yes, turning their noses up at Northerners. I have a girlfriend, who lives in
Alabama, who saw the American economic landscape of the time this way: "it's our turn now." She was right, of course. It was the South's turn, just like ten years later it would be Mexico's and China's turn. But, what she didn't understand was that it was not the same turn. Labor conditions, American economy, and American culture had changed.

The same towns that, in Austen's words, bloomed Camrys where they had once grown tobacco, also grew Walmarts and Targets, Starbucks and Applebees and more shopping outlets than one could ever imagine Americans needed. Former cotton plantations became subdivisions that were supposed to set apart the bourgeoise, who, looking at the new landscape, was supposed to believe that life too had started fresh. It was in fact the feeling of newness that was intoxicating. Americans suffered from a fogginess that was caused by a combination of "new thinking" (forgetting about the past, about those cotton fields) and the off-gassing of the cheap new furniture they insisted go inside of the vinyl-sided, wood-composition, brick facade homes that were going up overnight. Forgetting about those cotton plantations and the fact that they had represented a class system in which very few could ever imagine making it to the top, American workers welcomed the coming of a new class identity that felt rich if it wasn't as stable as it appeared. Perhaps companies like Toyota would be able to employ a critical mass and have enough of us driving their vehicles to believe that the American Dream had not died. What was the magic number? And the rest of Americans could dream that someone in their families could one day land a factory job, while the rest of our family members could work two jobs, one at Walmart, and maybe another elsewhere. In the meantime, second and third-shifters comforted themselves in the developing consumer economy and its offerings--an explosion of animated films, which made the line between the real and the fantastical harder and harder to distinguish, and the line between childhood and adulthood difficult to grasp as well.

The late twentieth century into the twenty-first was a feel-good era in which hardly anyone could imagine that Japanese car companies did not have the best interests of Americans at heart. American workers needed not be in union with each other for fair wages, fair working conditions, etc. Citizens of cities who won the new plants learned to be in union with the company. But as Austen writes, the honeymoon would be short-lived.

Two and a half years after publication of Austen's piece, GM supposedly is back on top. Toyota has had record losses, yet this should not be heard as good news. If GM was the twentieth-century symbol of the "old corporate model," in which workers could bargain for fairness, Toyota and Walmart, the twenty-first century symbols of cooperative relationships between management and labor are not I think going to be unseated, for how will we ever return, in a global economy, to the kind of wages that the UAW achieved? As Austen explains, what Americans should love about GM, about the UAW, and, yes, about Detroit is that the wages and rights that unionism won for auto workers set a standard for all American labor. So much for Southerners turning up their noses at the North or for people incessantly placing Detroit at the butt end of their jokes. American laborers in the late twentieth century screwed themselves though one can hardly blame them for having done so given the options.

And what are the options now? Well, Austen doesn't answer this question directly. He certainly does suggest that American workers will never have it as good as they had it during the height of Detroit, and he hints at something in his somewhat cynical look at kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, which better translated is to be understood as not wasting time or money, i.e. getting as much out of as few workers as possible. How far and wide has that concept spread. Just ask anyone in America. All of us have seen staffs cut, the handing over of multiple tasks to fewer and fewer employees, and workdays that do not end at 5:00.

Georgetown, Kentucky can thank Toyota twice. Thank the company for giving jobs to adults and then for attempting to indoctrinate young people into the virtues of systematization and efficiency. Georgetown schools unfortunately are not the only ones in the nation that have learned to value saving money, saving time, and saving what appear to be unnecessary steps in education and in life. Sleeping may soon come to be seen as an unnecessary step and, then, maybe eating as well. But thank God at least some of the kids did not conform so easily.