For almost 37 years, David Pickel has helped keep America on wheels.
With his earnings from the Firestone tire plant, he bought four Fords at Lakeside Motors, filled countless shopping carts at Kroger, put a daughter through college in Pittsburgh, contributed to the Christian Church of Mt. Zion, and still had enough left over for a few fancy meals at the Retirees Club at the airport.
But the future of his plant may depend on how well Firestone recovers from this summer’s recall of 6.5 million defective tires, most of them manufactured in Decatur.
Insisting there are no immediate plans, Youichuro Kaizaki, chief executive of Bridgestone Corp., the company’s Japanese parent, said this week that the Decatur plant might be shuttered at least temporarily for equipment improvements.
He refused to rule out the possibility that it could be closed permanently.
As federal officials add to the tally of deaths and injuries linked to those tires, a Congressional inquiry widens, and Jay Leno and David Letterman crack jokes about Firestone quality, residents are worried that Decatur could take the fall.
“A lot of people are nervous,” Pickel, 60, said Wednesday after visiting with co-workers at their union local.
“This would have an enormous impact on everyone in this town. I can’t imagine Decatur without Firestone.”
Congressional investigators charged Wednesday that Bridgestone, the world’s largest tiremaker, has known for at least four years about the defects that caused treads to separate. U.S. safety regulators say the faulty tires have been linked to 103 deaths and 400 injuries.
Leaders of the United Steelworkers Local 713, which represents 1,800 workers at the Decatur plant, maintain the fault is in the design of the tire and not in the manufacturing–a hotly debated contention that is the crux of a number of investigations and lawsuits.
“When things go wrong, someone has to be blamed,” said Harland Smith, a union official and quality control inspector at the plant. “So it’s easy to put the blame on us.”
Company officials here declined to be interviewed Wednesday, saying they were too busy supervising the making of replacement tires and preparing to appear at Congressional hearings.
But plant managers have been meeting with union and community leaders, trying to calm spreading fears.
Losing the landmark tire plant would be a crushing blow: Firestone is the city’s third-largest employer–behind Caterpillar Inc. and A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company. Bridgestone-Firestone contributes more than $100 million annually in payroll and business with local companies.
The Firestone controversy isn’t helping to repair Decatur’s image, tarnished by labor problems–all three of its largest employers had strikes in 1994–and last year’s headlines over racial strife in its schools.
“We will do anything to keep Firestone here, and we will go to Japan if we have to,” said Julie Moore, president of the area Chamber of Commerce.
Setting aside their differences, plant supervisors, union workers and civic leaders are banding together to defend Firestone’s reputation and save the plant.
“If the company goes down the tubes, we lose our jobs. That’s a no-brainer,” said Roger Gates, president of Local 713.
Union workers, who overwhelmingly approved a new three-year contract this month, have abandoned their once-fierce criticism of the replacement workers who briefly took their jobs during a bitter labor dispute six years ago. Many of the problem tires were manufactured in Decatur during that period.
Clarence Ditlow, head of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer watchdog group in Washington, said the Decatur plant cannot be the sole source of the problem.
“If it were a factory problem in Decatur, then all of the tires coming out of there ought to be bad,” Ditlow said.
“I have heard that there were up to 50 models of tires made there, and we don’t have 50 different lines being recalled.”
That argument runs counter to the position staked out by Ford Motor Co., which first pointed to Decatur as the root of the defective tire problem, based on problems with tires mounted on its Explorer model sport-utility vehicles.
After balking at Ford’s claims and those from others about its tires, the Japanese-owned tiremaker only recently made a turnaround, and itself pointed its fingers at the Decatur plant at a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington.
Figures supplied by the tiremaker and Ford showed that tires made in Decatur separated at much higher rates than those from other Bridgestone-Firestone plants. But most of the tires that resulted in accidents were mounted on Ford Explorers.
“I don’t think the problem is with Decatur: it’s with the Explorer and how the tire reacts to stress when mounted on the Explorer,” said Pickel, who has worked for Firestone for 36 years in variety of positions.
C. Tab Turner, an attorney from North Little Rock, Ark, who is handling more than a dozen cases involving allegedly defective tires, agrees.
“I think this a design problem,” he said. “This is not a manufacturing problem.”
Richard Baumgardner, who worked as an engineer at Firestone for 27 years and now works as a safety consultant for attorneys, said he has examined about 60 Firestone tires that are the subject of lawsuits against the company and hasn’t found “any glaring factory problems, particularly at Decatur.”
But attorney Bruce Kaster of Ocala, Fla., who has focused on alleged manufacturing problems at the Decatur plant in a case against the tiremaker, argues otherwise in a suit filed on behalf of a Florida family.
Kaster contends that one of the key problems with the Decatur plant was the lack of control over humidity during the manufacturing process. Too much moisture can cause the steel belts in the tires to eventually corrode and separate from the rubber.
He also said the company made production a priority over quality at Decatur, and that workers put on 12-hour shifts after 1996 could not do their jobs properly.
Richard G. Tucker, a former inspector at the plant who retired in 1994, said in a recent deposition that supervisors would sometimes overrule inspectors and order them to approve tires they had rejected. Daniel Batson, another retired inspector, said he saw busy inspectors pass on tires without checking them.
Bridgestone-Firestone officials have denied those allegations.
John Boettner, who was the plant’s general manager until retiring in July 1995, said there was no breakdown in the plant’s performance levels when replacement workers were hired amid a 10-month strike in 1994.
“We had quality assurance people. We had monitors in the factory. We were trying to be very, very careful,” he said.
No matter where fault lies, said longtime employee Pickel, most everyone in Decatur will suffer if the plant is shuttered. He thinks investigators should focus less on blame and more on isolating the defects and correcting them.
Pickel has been with Firestone longer than he has been married. His daughter, 35, was born after Pickel joined the company at $1.83 per hour. He will still buy Firestone tires, he said, because he believes in them and the folks who make them.
“It’s still a damn good tire,” he said, “no matter what anyone says.”
