Trauma for Laid-Off GM Workers Is More Emotional Than Financial

At first, being laid off isn’t all that bad, General Motors workers say. There’s the extra time to hang out with the guys, see more of the family and catch a ballgame or two on the tube.

Little things go wrong later. Maybe they get a little too drunk, and an argument turns into a big fight. All of a sudden, everything’s coming apart at home.

By then, they just want to get back to the assembly line.

They won’t be able to, though.

For the third time in six years, effective Monday, the second shift at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys will be laid off indefinitely. GM, following a past pattern, isn’t saying whether the 2,190 workers will ever be called back.

The company also is not guaranteeing that the plant will remain open at all past 1989, despite workers’ approval May 30 of the Japanese-style “team concept” of production, a change GM sought from the workers, who hoped it would encourage the company to continue operating the plant.

By 1989, GM intends to have phased out the Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds it makes at the Van Nuys plant. It has not yet designated a replacement model.

2 Previous Layoffs

The last layoff was for six months beginning in December, 1982, and the one before that, for 15 months, beginning in January, 1980. With those two instances in mind, the laid-off workers--those with less than 10 years’ seniority--are frustrated. They lament their on-again, off-again lives at GM, a company they say is a generous employer under their union agreements, but subordinates their welfare to increasing its profits.

The hardships the laid-off GM workers suffer probably will be more emotional than financial.

Some will be able to find temporary factory jobs, such as with aerospace firms, and will not seek unemployment benefits, but few jobs are likely to pay as much as the GM workers can earn sitting on their living room couches.

A supplemental unemployment-benefits fund contributed to by the workers, and administered by the company as part of the United Auto Workers’ contract with GM, offers laid-off workers 95% of their take-home pay for up to a year, depending on the amount of money in the fund.

To keep those benefits and make additional money too, many work “under the table,” cleaning swimming pools, as handymen in their neighborhoods, putting up fences or helping with light construction, all strictly for cash.

They must be officially jobless and collecting unemployment benefits to qualify for the special payments from GM.

Despite such opportunities to actually increase their incomes, no one talks about layoffs as an easy time for the workers and their families.

“A lot of the guys’ll come in, talking about fights with their wives, trouble with the kids,” says Joe B. Garcia, financial secretary for UAW Local 645 in Van Nuys. “They’re not used to seeing you home all day, so there’s lots more stress.”

Dennis Cathcart, a stocky 26-year-old with thinning blond hair, remembers taking his bicycle past the factory when he was a child, staring up at the long gray walls and the maze of tall, thin exhaust stacks.

“We’d ride past the place, and talk about it when we were little kids,” Cathcart said. “We’d say, ‘Hey, we’ll work there someday.’ ”

And he did. Cathcart last worked in the “hard-trim” department, where such parts as electrical wiring, steering columns, locks and mirrors are installed. He put in the hood-release cables, which run from the front of the car to the area underneath the dashboard.

He has been with GM for eight years. His first job was installing “door feathers,” rubber strips that seal the car from leaks. Later, he installed heaters, brake pedals, dashboards and other parts.

Cathcart was born in Connecticut, and spent his first year on a farm there.

His parents were divorced when he was still an infant, and he moved with his mother soon afterward to Southern California.

By 1963, his mother was married to Carlton Cathcart, who then was working for North American Rockwell in Palmdale. Two years later, the family moved to Mission Hills.

A Certain Pride

His stepfather, now 46, started at GM in 1966, and the young boy shared the man’s pride in the cars that left GM-Van Nuys.

All through his childhood, Cathcart liked working outdoors. “I guess I was never much for school,” he said one recent afternoon, sitting on a neighbor’s porch across the street from his mother’s Arleta home, where he has lived since the burglary of his Pacoima apartment in December. He never married.

Cathcart remembers a brief interval of rebellion against the expectations of his friends and family that he would take his place on the GM assembly line. The summer he was 16, as a student at San Fernando High School, he got a farm job in Connecticut, “milking cows, bucking hay.” He said, “I thought it was great.”

But in his senior year, Cathcart started at the plant anyway, explaining, “I didn’t know what else there was around.”

During previous second-shift layoffs, Cathcart saw friends leave the company.

“A lot of people said, ‘The heck with GM,’ it lasted so long, and they ended up at Lockheed or Rockwell, because there were jobs in aerospace. Those of us who waited around felt bitter by the end.”

Endorses Team Concept

Cathcart supports the team concept, in part because he hopes the arrangement will offer him the chance to do a variety of work, if he returns.

He says his back is often sore from bending over all day to install hood-release cables.

“A lot of us once said, ‘GM is our life,’ and we were psyched about what we were doing,” he said, adding that workers were filled with confidence that the giant corporation would care for their futures.

“But everybody lost that. They got worried about making payments on their bills and taking care of their families.”

Cathcart considers himself relatively mobile. He says he might go to Oregon soon, to visit his uncle

and help him restore cars. If the layoffs last past the summer--he doesn’t expect they will--he says he would consider getting another job.

Larry Barker wants his son, Larry Jr., 9, to have a trade. “I hope he learns something like being an electrician or a carpenter, so he never has to be out of work, never has to worry,” he said.

Barker, 36, a quiet man with gray, curly hair, worked most recently on the second shift in the body shop, where metal is welded to form the frame of the car. Having worked for GM for more than nine years, he was only months shy of the cutoff date for the layoffs.

His last job was installing brackets on the car’s underbody. He worked on the second shift, which runs from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. As a result, Barker was rarely able to see Larry Jr., his wife, Linda, or his 16-year-old nephew, who lives with him.

Years ago, Barker learned about working with his hands from his father, Troy Barker, an operator of plastic injection-mold equipment who moved his family often in pursuit of work.

Barker was born in Alliance, Ohio, but his early childhood was spent mostly in Missouri and Oklahoma. The family moved to California when he was 13, and lived in Garden Grove. In 1968, Barker graduated from Bolsa Grande High School. He then worked in a gas station for a year.

Afterward, Barker spent four years in the Air Force, working as a jet fighter mechanic at George Air Force Base in Victorville.

In 1973, Barker started to work for a plastic pipe company in Santa Ana, taking orders and making deliveries. Two years later, Barker was married. He started at GM in March, 1977, and Larry Jr. was born a month later.

Stayed Home With Baby

During the past two layoffs, he spent his days taking care of Larry Jr. His wife, Linda, works as an inspector at a Newbury Park electronics company. The baby “was really young then, and it made more sense than paying a baby sitter,” Barker said, in an interview in his Simi Valley home. “I was glad to have time with him.” Nevertheless, Barker said, being laid off was a lonely experience. “It was a hard feeling for me to sit at home while my wife went to work every day. . . . I was really depressed,” he said.

Moreover, Barker said, it was a stressful time. “I remember having more fights with my wife than at any time since we were married. It was always dumb things, like household chores, and then it would grow into something bigger.”

Lots of laid-off workers hang around bars most of the day, he said. “I could never afford that, but you hear stories about guys drinking all day, then going home and stirring up trouble with the family. They have too much time, so all they do is drink.”

He said that during the first layoff, when unemployment benefits ran out after a year, he went looking for another job. “Most employers are hesitant because they know when GM calls everyone back, they’re gonna go,” he said.

“There’s not many companies around that match GM’s wages and benefits for what basically are unskilled workers, at least compared to people with a trade,” Barker said. “But it’s frustrating when you see how the company wastes money. I think if they cut down on all the waste, they could save our jobs.”

Barker said he hopes eventually to be able to retire from the Van Nuys plant with a healthy pension. Auto workers are eligible for retirement after 30 years of service. “I hope the plant stays open that long,” he said.

During the long layoff that began in 1980, David Maldonado didn’t collect unemployment. “They gave me my slip, and I went straight to Lockheed,” Maldonado said. The Burbank defense contractor made Maldonado a structural assembler, riveting sheet metal for airplane skins.

But when GM called back workers in May, 1981, Maldonado went. He said he didn’t want to lose his seniority, and he didn’t like the way he was treated at Lockheed. “The foremen breathe down your neck all day, and the riveting sounds like gunfire,” he said.

Maldonado, who has been with GM for nine years, most recently worked on the first shift, in the chassis department, where parts including the engine and transmission are assembled. He has also worked in the cushion room, where seats are made, and in the body shop.

Moving to Lockheed wasn’t a completely new idea for Maldonado. His father, Louis, had worked for the company when Maldonado was growing up in Los Angeles, near Echo Park.

Maldonado’s mother died when he was 16; three years later, he struck out on his own. He wanted to be a disc jockey or a policeman, but his first full-time job was at a gas station off Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

Getting married in 1976 forced him to look for a job with better pay and prospects. Maldonado applied for a job at the GM plant, and started working there the following spring.

He and his wife, Irma, have lived in the same apartment in Sepulveda for eight years. They have two children, Anthony, 9 and Monique, 7. Maldonado says he always wanted a daughter, and he proudly shows Monique’s name tattooed on his chest.

“I want more for them than this,” he says. “I want a house with a yard. They play on the street, and it’s just dope addicts and drug deals going on. They shouldn’t have to see that.”

During the layoff in 1982, Irma, who is usually at home, worked in a shoe store, while Maldonado collected unemployment and watched the children.

‘I’d Wash the Car’

“She had to go to work,” he says. “She’d get tired of me being here, so I’d go outside and wash the car or something.”

This time, Maldonado plans to restore a 1957 Chevrolet during his time off. He also is concerned about staying in shape. “Everybody has a belly after a big layoff,” he said. “They look like they’ve been sitting on their butts for years.”

If the layoff lasts long, Maldonado says, he will try to get another factory job. But if GM ever reopens the shift, he says he plans to go back.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” he mused. “We all know we probably won’t have a future there, but we go back anyway.”