Flint Artifacts: The Shawn Chittle Flint Fashion Collection

Flint Artifacts: UAW Jacket Flint Truck and Bus

Flint Artifacts: UAW Local 599 Button

Flint Artifacts: U.A.W. Strike Poster

Interview: Design Faith and Gordon Young Talk about Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Kenneth Caldwell at Design Faith, a great blog about art, architecture and culture, came up with some great questions for me after reading Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City.

What about Flint’s history contributed the most to its decline?

Depends on who you ask. General Motors is an obvious culprit for eliminating close to 80,000 jobs in Flint. Some say it’s the United Automobile Workers union’s fault because the union was too militant and too demanding. Of course, labor agreements are the result of negotiations. General Motors didn’t have to give in to union demands. And union workers didn’t have anything to do with the horrible management decisions General Motors made over the years. Then there are U.S. policies that effectively swapped our industrial economy for the so-called service economy. The middle class withered, but we get to buy a lot of cheap crap at big box stores. Others point out that Flint never diversified its economy, but who diversifies during the glory years? Is Silicon Valley trying to diversify and develop something other than technology right now? So it’s a complicated question, and it’s probably a combination of all those things.

This pattern of corporations using up and wasting towns seems to be a global trend, not just a U.S. one?

Corporations abandon cities to varying degrees all the time. And that is one of the factors creating shrinking cities all over the world. Some of the statistics are pretty surprising. More cities shrank than grew in the developed world over the past 30 years. Fifty-nine U.S. cities with more than a hundred thousand people lost at least a tenth of their residents over the last 50 years. Flint and Detroit are high-profile examples because they lost half their population, but the same thing happened in Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. But don’t assume this is just a Rust Belt phenomenon. The Great Recession ensured that cities in the South and the Sunbelt are part of the trend now.

Read the entire interview here.  

Flint Artifacts: UAW Ring

Flint Expatriate Joe Steve tells the story of a UAW ring:

"I had a great upbringing in our old neighborhood and looking back on it I really had it good. My father was a sports writer for the Flint Journal, John Steve, who died in 1962. My mother married John Misko in 1969 when I was 10 years old. We moved to John Misko's house on the south end because his house was smaller. It was also a really cool neighborhood as we lived 5 houses away from Lincoln Park. Mom couldn't get what she wanted for the house on Welch Blvd so after only 6 months we moved back to Welch and my stepfather had an offer on his house within four hours of listing it. I stayed there until I graduated from Powers in 1977 and my folks moved to Florida after I graduated from Aquinas College in 1981.

"My mother will be 95 years old this year. She gave me my stepfather's ring when she moved into a nursing home here in Grand Rapids 9 years ago. I have grown to understand what a great stepfather I had. He had no children of his own, as his first wife got sick and was not able to have children before she died. He worked 2nd shift at Fisher Body as a Tool and Die man for more than 30 years.

"And one more cool fact. My stepfather live next door to Angelo Braniff , one of the three Angelos who founded Angelo's Coney Island."

The Reuthers: Brothers on the Line

The great-nephew of UAW labor leader Walter Reuther has made a documentary about the Reuther Brothers who played such a key role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

Brothers On The Line explores the legacy of the Reuther brothers - Walter, Roy, and Victor - pioneering labor organizers and social justice statesman, and their remarkable leadership of the United Auto Workers union. Directed by Victor’s grandson Sasha Reuther and narrated by Martin Sheen, the film follows the brothers from their rise as shop-floor organizers in 1930s Detroit to leaders in collective bargaining, civil rights, and international labor solidarity. It combines rare UAW archive footage, personal photos, oral histories, and original HD interviews with a broad spectrum of labor, civil rights and political personalities. A timely tale of one family's quest to compel American democracy to live up to its promise of equality, Brothers On The Line is a dramatic blueprint of successful social action.

You can follow the film on Facebook here.

Here's a rundown of upcoming screenings:

Oct 5-7

Hell's Half Mile Film Festival, Bay City, MI

(specific screening times not released yet)

Oct 16

Stranger Than Fiction @ IFC Center, NYC

Oct 30

Voices in Action: Human Rights on Film @ NorthWest Film Center, Portland, OR

There may be a November showing in Flint at the Global Issues Film Festival. Monitor the Facebook page for details.

Remembering the Flint Sit-Down Strike

Flint Photos: Sit Down Strikers 1937

Sit-Down Strikers in the cafeteria at Fisher Body Plant #1 in 1937.

Flint Photos: Sit-Down Strike Orchestra

Revenge Motive: The 1998 U.A.W. Strike and the Future of Flint

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a Flint Expatriate who still works in the automotive industry. We talked about the reasons G.M. abandoned Flint, covering the list of the usual rationales, including cheaper labor elsewhere, etc. But he also mentioned a motive I've never really heard before — revenge. Specifically, revenge for the 1998 strike that started at the Metal Fab Center and spread to Delphi East. Before it was over, the strike lasted 54 days, cost G.M. $3 billion in lost profits and $12 billion in sales. It closed 27 of G.M.'s 29 assembly plants and over 100 parts plants in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. While both sides made concessions to reach a settlement, he said, G.M. never forgave Flint, and the corporation abandoned any hope of maintaining a large presence in the city where it was created.

Has anyone else ever heard this theory before? I'm just wondering how prevalent this idea is in the Flint area. Is this something people believe or talk about? I was not really writing or reporting about Flint in 1998, but I was surprised that I'd never heard it before. Wondering if it's just one person's conjecture.

Singing with the Sit-Down Strikers

A video on the Flint Sit-Down Strike featuring Dan Hall singing a strikers song written by David O. Norris.

GM and UAW Reach Tentative Deal

The UAW and GM have reached a tentative agreement to cut costs and restructure payments to the healthcare fund, but a lot more needs to happen for the automaker to avoid bankruptcy.

Nick Bunkley of The New York Times reports:

The U.A.W. did not release details of the deal, which is subject to ratification by G.M. workers. The agreement is expected to be similar to one reached last month with Chrysler, which allowed that automaker to substitute equity for up to half of the $10 billion owed to its retiree health care fund. G.M. owes about twice that amount to the fund for its workers.

The deal is one of the government’s requirements for G.M. to win more loans but is not enough in itself to keep the carmaker from having to file for bankruptcy protection on June 1, the government’s deadline. More important, G.M. needs to persuade nearly all of the bondholders who hold more than $27 billion of its debt to swap their claims for stock in the restructured company. Most analysts expect the offer to fail.

Buick North: The Last Holdouts

One of the many memorable vehicles produced at Buick City. (Photo courtesy of papajim).

Last month, readers reviewed what's left of Flint's auto factories. Today's New York Times has a portrait of the "Last Holdouts" at Buick North.

Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkley report:

All that is left is Flint North, which built more than 20 million of G.M.’s 3800-model V-6 engines until production ceased last August. Some workers are removing equipment and preparing to start building four-cylinder engines for the Chevrolet Volt and Cruze at a newer plant across town next year, while others still build torque converters, gears, pistons, shafts and other powertrain components.

The plant is surrounded by crumbling and empty buildings, and dead-end streets that once led into Buick City. It is a neighborhood of boarded-up stores and near-desolate streets, with the exception of the overflowing parking lots on Sundays at the Baptist churches along Industrial Avenue across from the plant.

The last 450 workers feel fortunate to have another factory to go to, having seen too many friends and relatives laid off over the years.

“General Motors has taken good care of me,” said Mike Stoica, 60, who started at G.M. fresh out of high school in 1967. “I’ve had a good life for not having a college education and doing something I love to do.”

That way of life is vanishing at G.M. plants across the United States, but no city has been affected like Flint. When Buick City was at its peak production in the mid-1980s, G.M. had 80,000 workers spread across the city. Now it is down to about 5,000, a number that could fall more in a bankruptcy.

“People talk about closing a plant,” said Bill Jordan, president of U.A.W. Local 599 and a 32-year G.M employee. “We closed a city here. Everything that any city had, we had here.”

A Test of Wills

G.M. and the U.A.W. struggle to reach some kind of agreement that will cut costs.

Heavy Metal Drama

Do you sometimes find yourself longing for the days when America made something besides exotic financial derivatives? Well just sit back and enjoy this "capitalist realist" drama that shows what goes into making a Chevy. It was filmed in Flint just months before the U.A.W. won union recognition via the sit-down strike.

P.S. I should warn you that this is only the first part of this classic. It builds up to a tantalizing crescendo, then cuts you off. You can catch the rest on YouTube.

Settling Scores

Care to take a peek at the Senate Republicans' internal strategy memo? It seems dealing a blow to organized labor was a bigger concern than dealing with the economic crisis when it came to loaning money to the Big Three.

Disorganized

Jonathan Cutler says the U.A.W. is partly to blame for the Big Three's problems, but not for the reason you might think. The union's mistake? The failure to organize workers at the non-union foreign auto factories in the U.S.

"And yet there is nothing inherently unsustainable about employing a high-priced, unionized workforce. The crisis of Detroit's wage bill is entirely relative. Specifically, their labor costs far exceed the low-cost, nonunion American workforce at the U.S.-based, foreign-owned plants of competitors Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru.

"If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union's utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn't it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized?

"As is now clear, when the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat."

Thanks to Jim Holbel for passing this along.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

The much-maligned U.A.W. job bank may finally be on the way out as the union makes concessions.

Engines from Flint

This is relatively old news, but still good news:

General Motors chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner has announced that the company will invest US$370 million in the U.S. to build a new manufacturing plant for its global four-cylinder engines in Flint, Michigan. The plant will begin production in 2010, and will be the exclusive manufacturing facility in North America to produce the Chevrolet Volt’s range-extending engine.

“GM, the UAW and the City of Flint have had a long-standing relationship,” Wagoner said. “Based on the capability and the commitment of the men and women who will work here, the tradition and leadership from UAW Local 599, the tremendous automotive heritage that underlies this region, and the strong partnerships we enjoy with local, state and federal governments, we are confident that Flint is exactly the right place to build our all-new powertrain plant.”