Fwd: LIGHTS OUT IN NEWARK, DELAWARE - Chrysler plant shuts down permanently
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As Chrysler leaves, workers recall era
Union workers, retirees fought for their benefits -- now they're worried they'll vanish
By ANDREW EDER • The News Journal • December 21, 2008
Chrysler's Newark assembly plant, which produced its last Dodge Durango on Friday, drew thousands of workers through its doors over a half-century. For most, it was a job, not a calling.
"Went to work one winter. Turned into a lot more." That's how Bill Powers, a New Castle County councilman, described his more than 28 years with Chrysler.
Sam Lathem, president of the state AFL-CIO, said he was running out of unemployment benefits after leaving the Army, prompting him to find a job at Chrysler in 1965. Thirty-nine years later, he retired from the plant.
"The work was good," Lathem said. "It was hard, but it was a good place to work."
The daily grind of assembling parts into finished cars may not be glamorous, but the industry has helped define and build middle-class America. Nearly 240,000 workers are directly employed by the Big Three automakers, and the industry's impact ripples out into the economy.
This month, more than 1,750 Delaware autoworkers are out of a job as the Chrysler plant closes, General Motors cuts 410 workers at its Boxwood Road plant and parts companies Mopar and Lear close their Newark facilities.
And thousands of Chrysler and GM retirees in the region, worried about their pensions and health-care benefits, are nervously tracking news of their former employers, whose prospects seemed to brighten Friday after the White House said it would extend emergency loans to the automakers.
"It really dims the joy for the holiday, worrying about whether you're going to lose a portion of your pension and all of your health care," said Amos McCluney Jr., chairman of the retiree chapter of United Auto Workers Local 1183, which has about 3,000 retirees in the four-state area, including more than 1,000 in Delaware.
McCluney, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, moved to Detroit after college in the mid-1950s to find an auto industry job. His first application with GM was rejected because he had too much education.
So McCluney applied to Chrysler, where he said he was a fifth-grade educated farmhand, and was hired at a Plymouth plant in 1955. He transferred to the Newark plant in 1959.
McCluney held a number of leadership positions with the local union and served in the state House of Representatives in the early 1970s. As the issue of U.S. autoworker wages and benefits has come under the microscope, McCluney and other retirees chafe at the perception of UAW workers as overpaid.
"When you put 30 years in chasing cars ... it takes wear and tear on your body," said John Joswick, 54, a retiree from the GM Boxwood Road plant. "A lot of people don't realize how much. You're doing the same thing every day."
"I challenge anyone to go in that shop and work on that line for $28 an hour and feel like he's earning too much," McCluney said.
UAW workers earn more than their non-union counterparts at foreign auto company plants in the United States, and the union will likely have to make wage and benefit concessions as a condition of receiving federal aid.
But union advocates say their wages and benefits, won through tough negotiations at the bargaining table, have supported countless families and raised the country's standard of living.
"The automobile industry is the backbone of the middle class of America," McCluney said.
For Manuel Rodriguez Pacheco, his job at the Chrysler plant's paint shop helped raise five children and allow his wife to stay at home.
"My wife took care of the house, I took care of the bread," said Pacheco, 79, who retired in 1994 after 36 years at the plant.
As it was for many workers, Chrysler was a family affair: Two of Pacheco's daughters and a son have worked at Chrysler.
Pacheco remembers his pride in helping build the small, front-wheel-drive K-cars in the 1980s, a vehicle that rejuvenated both Chrysler and the Newark plant when the company last teetered on the brink of insolvency.
"That was the best car they ever built," Pacheco said. "And they sold just like hot cakes. But why they started building big cars, I have no idea."
The Newark plant began assembling its first "big car," the Durango, in 1997, helping launch Chrysler into the large sport utility vehicle market. But fuel costs have taken the bottom from beneath the SUV market, and plunging sales of the Durango and Chrysler Aspen helped lead to the Newark plant's demise.
The Chrysler and GM plants in Delaware employed a combined 4,000 as recently as February 2007.
With the Chrysler plant closing and GM layoffs, the auto-building work force is down to 578 hourly workers at the Boxwood Road plant.
"We've always looked at Chrysler as a major hub for industrial manufacturing," said Newark Mayor Vance Funk. "It's kind of sad to lose part of that image."
Chrysler workers in Newark had to decide whether to stay with the company and hope to land at another Chrysler plant, or take a buyout or early-retirement package.
"That's a big decision," Powers said. "I know there were some husbands and wives in the plant. They make a decision to transfer ... one might have 20 years, one might have 15. They could end up in two different parts of the country."
Complicating the situation is a severely depressed auto market, and an uncertain future for Chrysler.
"If you move to another city, and that market closes down, then you're starting over again with another decision," said Ed Booth III, a team leader on the Newark plant's assembly line. "If the economy was better, it would be a lot easier decision for people."
Booth, 55, took an early-retirement package. He sold his New Castle house last week and plans to move to his beach house near Millsboro.
Like many Chrysler workers, he plans to find a new job, but he's not sure in what field. In preparing for the plant's closing, workers were finding few job opportunities in the midst of a recession, Booth said.
"We feel like crap," said one plant worker who took a buyout. "You know, I got two kids, a husband who's not working, and now I'm out of a job. How am I supposed to feel?"
Contact Andrew Eder at 324-2789 or ae...@delawareonline.com.
The News Journal/JENNIFER CORBETT
Amos McCluney Jr., 81, a retired Chrysler employee
and chairman of the retiree chapter of the United Auto Workers, says union
workers and retirees' wages and benefits have supported countless families and
raised the country's standard of living.
(Buy
photo)
In this 1965 photo, Amos McCluney Jr., now 81 and retired, sits in Chrysler's Union Hall. McCluney started at the Plymouth plant in Detroit in the 1950s. He transferred to the Newark plant in 1965.
Getty Images file
A worker paints a Dodge Durango at the Newark Chrysler plant in 2002. With the factory's closing, workers had to decide whether to stay with the company and hope to land another job or take a buyout.
Delaware Public Archives Newark Photograph Exhibit
M48 Patton tanks are lined up at the Chrysler tank factory in 1952. The plant was built for Korean War production and phased out when peace came.
News Journal file
Gov. Pete du Pont prepares to drive the first Plymouth Volare built in Newark. When Chrysler sought $1.2 billion in federal loan guarantees in 1980, du Pont proposed a $5 million state loan, and Delaware became the first state to approve financial aid for the automaker.
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