Working

When I was offered the job I was a bit stunned. Summertime employment in the car factories of Michigan was mostly an impossible dream for college students. The work was generally vacation relief for assembly line laborers and did not last more than three months. The pay went up to $10 per hour and $400 per week - an absurd amount of cash for any young person in the early 1970s. The federal minimum wage was under $2 per hour early in that decade, which meant working in a car factory earned about five times more than any other pay available to a student on summer break.

The moment I told my father about getting hired was the only instance I can recall where I made him happy. He smiled, and almost shook my hand when I explained I was going to be at Fisher Body Plant #1, which was where he began his decades of hard labor when he came up from the South after World War II. My parents had been seduced to leave the cotton fields of northwest Arkansas by a friend of my father’s who had driven up to their sharecropper’s shack in a shining new Buick and told them of a much less laborious existence and reliable income up above the Mason-Dixon Line. His name, which I later decided sounded like it came from a John Grisham novel, was Tater Kotch, and he eventually returned to drive my parents and their two young daughters to Flint, Michigan.

They had no money to rent a room or a house and Tater had dropped them at the bus station. Daddy had gone to the streets looking for work and my mother was marshaling two toddlers among the passenger benches when she was approached by a confused elderly woman.

“My child,” she asked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just trying to get my girls settled down until my husband gets back.”

“And where is he, may I ask?”

“He went out to ask around about work and maybe look for a place we can stay until he gets paid.”

“You’ve no money then?”

“Just a little bit for food for a while.”

“Where did you come from?”

“We were living in Arkansas and Mississippi and sharecropping cotton. That’s where my husband is from. But I’m from Newfoundland.”

“Oh my, well, let me sit with you a while and when your husband gets back you can come with me and stay at our house. We have some extra space you could use for a bit until your husband finds work.”

“I don’t know what to say,” my mother said. “We can use the help.”

She described the room to me many years later as a kind of unfinished garage conversion, but there was a mattress on the floor, a toilet, a sink, and a shower. Daddy got up early every morning and walked up the hill to the Fisher Body Plant #1 and stood in line hoping for a job building cars. After waiting, sometimes several hours, a foreman emerged from behind the gray walls and walked the line of applicants, tapping the shoulders of the men he was hiring. Daddy’s memory was that it took him more than two months to get selected. We were lucky. Blacks and Hispanics were almost always ignored by the shop foreman.

“You’ve got yourself a damned good job, then, buddy boy.” Daddy was visibly pleased that I was about to be in the same factory where he worked as I gave him the news of my summer employment. “You probably don’t need them college doin’s now you got on the line.”

“It’s not my future, Daddy,” I said. “It’s good summer work.”

“You don’t know that. It could be something for good."

“I’m going to be popping metal ashtrays into plastic door molds of cars as they pass on the line. I’m not sure I can even survive the summer without going crazy.”

“You can’t walk away from hourly pay like that.” He was horrified by his eldest son’s thinking, which was hardly a new development.

“I’ll hang on, long as I can.”

My endurance lasted eleven days and that was only because I was able to work my way back down the line to where the doors were hung on the vehicles, pop in the ashtrays, and return to my station to read books until the next car arrived without the ashtray. The interval was almost twenty minutes. I knew by quitting that I was going to provide my father with a new reason to be disappointed in me, but I did not care. We were not close and I was only beginning to understand why as I entered my twenties. My great interest was in living a life different than my parents, less violent and argumentative, and without crippling financial burden. The paycheck I received for those eleven days was just over $1000. It enabled me to purchase a Honda 450 motorcycle and head back in the direction my parents had abandoned with their hopefulness.

The long post-war economic boom of the United States had not yet slowed that summer of 1970 when I strapped a sleeping bag and canvas tent to my motorcycle and rode off with destination unknown. Much of the world seemed hungry for “Detroit Steel,” and jobs associated with creating those vehicles were coveted. The fact that I was able to quit shortly after gaining employment made me a bit disreputable among my contemporaries, and especially their parents. I was not a laggard, though, and my first two jobs in high school were an indication I was willing to work hard, regardless of how abhorrent the labor was. I got $1.75 an hour to clean out dog and cat cages at a veterinarian’s clinic on weekend mornings, which meant hand-scrubbing out animal feces and urine, most of it drying into darkened newspapers used to line the floor of the cage. When they were cleaned, my final task was to use a hose to wash the offal into a large drain described as a “honey pot.”

My second employer was also conducting projects that involved scatology. Sewer lines were laid through the neighborhoods near the factories and households were required to disconnect their septic tanks and hook up to the new municipal systems. Contractors used backhoes to dig trenches from the septics out to the curb where the underground flange was located for connection. These slashes in the ground were sometimes ten to fifteen feet deep and there were no regulations requiring reinforcement of the walls. My job was to stand at the bottom of those ditches as I was handed a three-foot piece of crock pipe to secure the main line. Connecting often took as many as twenty segments and I worked quickly to stay ahead of crumbling, earthen walls, and, often, the flowing human waste when people had forgotten to turn off their water supplies while we worked. The job was mostly horrid but I got $5 an hour and was as grateful for the paycheck as I was when summer ended and I was able to return to the university.

As we prepare to turn our nation over to a blatant oligarchy, I have been thinking much about the labor class, people like my parents, who believed at least in the notional value of American opportunity. The U.S., however, has never really kept the implied promise of abundance that is supposed to be on offer in return for effort. Daddy lifted bumpers out of a steel metal press and loaded them onto wooden pallets for most of his working life, and my mother was a waitress in a burger joint, carrying plates of burgers and fries and open-faced sandwiches to tables and booths of truckers, teachers, and factory workers. She made $.85 cents an hour and got nickel and dime tips to help feed her six children. Her hourly wage was just over half of the federal minimum of $1.60. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) inflation calculator data suggests that $1.60 in 1971 is approximately $11.50 to $12.50 in 2024 dollars, depending on precise inflation rates. Because the minimum wage in the “richest nation on Earth” has not changed since 2009 and has frozen at $7.25 an hour, the hourly wage of today has about $5 dollars less purchasing power than the $1.60 of 1971.

This type of unfairness is what gives rise to unions. United Auto Workers (UAW) fought for and won benefits like wage increases, health insurance, retirement pensions, paid vacation, and sick leave. In fact, the Fisher Body #1 plant where my father landed his first job in Michigan, and I had secured summer employment, was a key site of the famous 1936–37 Flint Sit-Down Strike, a pivotal event in labor history that led to the recognition of the UAW by General Motors. My father’s tenth-grade education became less of a handicap on his earning power following the advent of the UAW. No such organization existed to assist workers like my mother in the food service industry, an immigrant who did not attend school past eighth grade.

“Your dad and I just did what we had to do, son,” my mother once told me. “We had you kids and those were the only jobs we could get.”

Has anything changed for U.S. workers? In Washington, the richest man in the world is reportedly looking at dramatic cuts to the federal budget that will further serve the wealthy with tax favors and cut social safety nets like Medicare and Medicaid along with scholarships and food assistance for disadvantaged students in public schools and universities. His power emanates from an appointment by a fellow oligarch, the President-elect, to a previously non-existent department. The ballot box had no say. The second richest man in the world, meanwhile, is fighting against striking teamsters seeking better pay and benefits from his company, Amazon. Thousands of his delivery drivers walked off their jobs for about a week leading up to Christmas Eve.

Jeff Bezos seems hardly bothered, though, and points out the workers are not employees of his company even though they wear Amazon uniforms and drive branded vehicles. Third-party contractors provide delivery services for Amazon, the second largest corporation in this country with 720,000 employees across 1000 warehouse sites, and they, the rich man claims, employ his delivery force, not him. Bezos, the company’s founder, might be distracted after proposing marriage to his girlfriend aboard his $500 million dollar yacht. Reports are that he has arrived in Aspen on his jet, followed by an entourage, which is supposedly getting ready for a $600 million dollar wedding ceremony in the Rocky Mountain resort town. Bezos denies it all, just as he denies people working for his company are working for his company.

Eventually, everyone at the Fisher Body Plant #1, lost their jobs. General Motors’ hubris subsequent to the initial Arab Oil Embargo in 1973, caused the company to lose market share to more fuel-efficient Japanese vehicles. GM just kept building big V-8 engines and muscle cars and there were fewer and fewer buyers. Plant #1 was closed in the early 80s and demolished in the latter part of that decade as GM downsized global operations. Flint began to wither, and tens of thousands became unemployed because of corporate greed and mismanagement. That caught the attention of neophyte filmmaker Michael Moore (no relation). His first documentary, Roger and Me, was a narrative of his attempts to find and interview GM’s CEO Roger Smith, and seek answers for what was happening to Moore’s (and my) hometown. The demolition of Plant #1 is the central moment of the film.

Oddly, Moore and I grew up not ten miles apart, and his father also worked in a factory, AC Delco, which made spark plugs just down the road from my mother’s house. When he began work on his film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s producer contacted me to be interviewed for the documentary. My first two books on the Bush Administration had been published and one had become a best seller with information he clearly found compelling. The pitch for my participation was that an author he had interviewed and included in his documentary Bowling for Columbine had become a million-seller. I was easily convinced and flew to New York for the taping. There are clips of my comments in the first 15 minutes of the film, but there is no mention of my books, their titles on screen, or in the narration. My name appears with the subtitle, “Investigative Reporter.” Book sales did not move.

Moore’s film, in my estimation, was a masterful piece of work. It confronted the lies, disinformation, and lack of democratic process as the U.S. invaded Iraq after the attacks of 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with that tragedy, but it was a nation led by an American boogeyman, and, more critically, it “floated on a sea of oil.” The Bush Administration made up reasons to invade, and conventional media failed miserably at confronting the lies of all the president’s men. Fahrenheit 9/11 became the highest-grossing documentary film of all time with a total of $222 million in global box office receipts. I was prompted to call Moore at his studio in New York and ask why he had left out information about my books, which had been promised in exchange for my participation. I was never able to reach him or his producer after several calls. The filmmaker was behaving exactly like the people his movies had criticized.

Maybe he was working on becoming an oligarch, too.