They call all day long asking what`s the word, what can they do and what`s the union, or anyone, doing?
Willie Thorpe doesn`t run from their calls because he knows how much they fret about losing their jobs and how they fear life without General Motors Corp.
But Thorpe, 42, a massive man with an easy-going manner and a gentle Kentucky drawl, doesn`t offer any assurances about the future.
”Just do your best,” advises the president of Local 801 of the IUE electricians` union.
”It is no good for them, worrying about tomorrow,” he said in a low, almost sorrowful voice. ”You can`t make plans to go out and buy a house or a car or send your kid to a good college. It is a lot of ifs.”
Many have been living on ”ifs” since GM Chairman Robert C. Stempel announced last December that the nation`s stumbling auto giant would shut 21 plants and trim its work force by 74,000 by 1995.
Stempel`s words may have calmed Wall Street and GM stockholders, but it had an opposite impact on thousands of workers, parts-supply companies, local officials and others whose lives are linked to the world`s largest manufacturer.
He also left many in limbo when he promised to decide soon whether to shut a plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., or Arlington, Texas, but offered no indication when the other decisions would come.
In Dayton, GM is the largest private employer, the last giant company, the final vestige of a world in which anyone with two strong arms could find decent work at good pay. The downsizing of GM may change all that.
GM hasn`t announced which plants it will close, so the unease grows in this traditional blue-collar community. Many recall the trauma of the 1970s, when such giants as Dayton Press and Dayton Tire and Rubber Co. vanished, and National Cash Register, known locally as ”the Cash,” transferred its production work.
More than 32,000 area factory jobs vanished.
Today, the unease surfaces in different ways.
At GM`s Truck and Bus Assembly plant in Moraine, Walter Tolley, 47, a spray painter and 23-year GM veteran, is struck by the constant nervous chatter in the plant about the GM closings and the way some workers` attitudes towards their jobs have improved.
”I see people working harder and trying to do a better job, people I never expected. Maybe it woke them up,” said the gray-haired worker. He sat in his time-worn 1981 Pontiac one cool, cloudy day last week, waiting for the second shift to begin.
GM`s Stempel makes the same point. Asked about the impact on workers, he admitted most are not happy, but called the situation positive in the long-run. ”Our quality is up. Our absenteeism is down. . . . It is a tough world, they know,” he said last week in Chicago.
But there is the other side-the fear and panic about an uncertain future. This has already taken root in Dayton, where the area`s unemployment rate was a modest 5.5 percent in December (8.2 percent in the city itself), and where the recession has stirred only minor ripples.
It is a feeling, says University of Dayton economics professor John Weiler, that things are suddenly getting worse. It comes, he says, from a string of bad news such as the closing of a long-time department store in downtown Dayton and the Pentagon`s plans to shut a 2,000-worker defense plant nearby.
Wright State University economics professor Robert Premus was dismayed last week at a television station`s taping of a town hall meeting where community leaders talked about local problems, beginning with job losses.
”They blamed Japan, labor, management, the Mexicans, the schools and teachers,” he recalled unhappily. ”There was this pointing of fingers at everyone and looking for blame. I decided not to participate. I decided this group needed a psychiatrist and not an economist.”
At another meeting last week, called by the Dayton-area AFL-CIO, fingers were also pointed, but they were all aimed at the Japanese.
After taking a pledge of allegiance, the overflow crowd heard a country-and-western singer sing about products made in ”occupied U.S.A.” They watched a videotape of Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee Iacocca`s furious attack on Japanese automakers after his recent trip there, and then heard two Ohio manufacturers explain how Japanese automakers drove them out of business.
As the audience`s fury towards the Japanese grew, regional AFL-CIO director Wes Wells declared to loud applause, ”I come from the old school. If an SOB hits you in the mouth, you hit him back.”
Their anger was hardly new. A Toyota was destroyed and burned at a recent AFL-CIO rally in Dayton, where workers set a paper Japanese flag on fire.
If U.S. buyers will only stop purchasing Japanese cars and trucks, GM`s problems will go away, workers at the meeting were told.
But GM has to solve its problems now, and many in the Dayton area are convinced they are the ones who will pay the price.
They explain that the Dayton area is a likely target because it has 11 GM plants, the most GM facilities outside Detroit and Flint, Mich. And even if no Dayton plant is on the first list, they expect GM`s downsizing to catch up with its factories sooner or later.
They remember how GM once had 36,000 workers in the area, compared with 20,000 today, and how there used to be five GM division headquarters while there is one today.
Mostly they fret about the fate of the Truck and Bus plant in Moraine, a suburb just south of Dayton. A mammoth facility with 3,400 workers that sprawls over 2 million square feet, it reportedly cost GM over $1 billion to convert it in 1979 from a Frigidaire appliance plant.
Their fears are fed by news reports, rumors and second-guessing that began quite unexpectedly Dec. 18 with a Detroit Free Press story that also appeared in the Dayton Daily News, which, with a daily circulation of 178,000, is Dayton`s only newspaper. Citing unnamed sources, the story said the Moraine plant is one of those slated to close.
At the downtown Dayton offices of Willie Thorpe`s union, which has 3,200 members at the Moraine plant, the telephones rang all day.
Kim Faris, news director for Z-93, a ”Top 40” FM station, raced to keep up with local reaction to the story that day, thinking it seemed as if somebody very important had died.
In its coverage the next day of Stempel`s announcement about the system-wide layoffs, the New York Times cited unnamed analysts who said the Moraine plant was indeed a likely closing target since it needs a $160 million paint shop.
Brad Tillson, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, tried to preach calm and cooperation that Sunday in his regular column.
”Last week there was a glint of panic in their eyes as folks in the Miami Valley absorbed the latest economic shock waves to hit our community,” he wrote. A large headline on the front page declared, ”1 area GM plant sure to close.”
Dayton Mayor Richard Clay Dixon, whose father was a GM production worker and whose brother recently retired as a GM manager, suspects GM has already made its decision and that it is not good for the Moraine plant.
He reasons that, unlike in the past, there have been neither leaks nor reassurances from GM officials about what`s to come.
”It would have been better if they had made the decision and announced which plants are going to close so we would not be left hanging,” he said.
But Dixon, and most of the area`s politicians and business and union officials, are not sitting still. They have met with local GM officials and in Detroit. They have talked with Ohio Gov. George Voinovich and sought support from their representatives in Washington.
They say GM will be offered a package of incentives from the state, the different unions involved and local communities. At Moraine, they say, it may involve help for building the kind of paint shop used at the GM Truck and Bus facilities in Linden, N.J., and Shreveport, La.
But there is a problem.
GM has vowed to shun a bidding war between communities and not seek deals. Nonetheless, local leaders such as Tom Heine, president of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, say it makes sense to encourage GM to stay in the area.
What makes the situation especially troubling to Mayor Dixon is there are few local high-paying blue-collar jobs like those at GM. Jobs that support middle-income families in Dayton, that help them keep up their houses and pay their taxes, he said.
Tim Schwab, 36, a talkative Teamsters union member who works with the trucks that deliver the Moraine plant`s products-S-10 and S-15 trucks and four-door utility vehicles-put it differently.
He had just finished a game of electric darts after work at John Bull`s, a popular pub near the plant. He set down his darts, took a sip of dark coffee and slowly said:.
”You got a lot of people here accustomed to their check being there every Friday. A lot of people went from high school to this plant, and if they lose this, then they lose it all, `cause they got all their eggs here.
