That Old Gang of Mine

They knew it wasn’t going to be an ordinary day when they came to work that overcast morning at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys.

Rumors greeted them at the front gate that something was in the wind, something big, something important.

Then one of the guys on the maintenance crew spotted a flatbed truck set up like a stage at the rear of the plant with sound equipment on it.

An announcement was coming.

The optimists were guessing the company had decided to manufacture a new car in Van Nuys when the Camaros and Firebirds were done.

Or maybe they’d become a “flex plant,” capable of building different cars on short notice.

Like combat troops on the front line, they desperately wanted good news--that the war was over and they’d be home by Christmas--but beneath the optimism lay a gathering dread.

And then they heard: The big plant would shut down in a year and 2,600 workers would be out on the street.

“We were stunned,” Russ Bach says, still not quite believing it. At 35, he’s been with GM for 16 years. It’s the only job he’s ever held.

“There was a heavy hush after the announcement,” Brian Cox says. “Everyone was suddenly very much afraid.” Cox migrated here from England 15 years ago. This has been his first and only job in America. He’s 46.

The workers went home devastated that dark Friday. Some raged. Some cried. Some got drunk.

“It’ll be the end of something more important than a job,” Bach says. “We’re family. What will become of us now?”

For some, work is work and nothing more. Everyone sang “Take This Job and Shove It” a few years ago. It became a kind of anthem of non-involvement. You does your work and you draws your pay.

But for others, a job is bigger than that. Work is somewhere to go every day, a place to be, and the company that provides work is an extension of self for those who otherwise have no self.

“I don’t care how much severance pay they might get at GM,” says psychologist Chaytor Mason. “It will never replace the old gang. They won’t just be closing doors next year. They’ll be shutting down people’s lives.”

Losing a job by whatever means is heartbreaking. Sepia-toned photographs from the Great Depression still haunt the collective memory.

We see men without work in unemployment lines and bread lines, all dignity drained from them. We see the stricken faces of their wives and the frightened eyes of children.

Pride died in the winters of the ‘30s. Desperation clawed at our souls.

The depression proved, and perhaps enhanced, the importance of the work ethic in America. To be employed is to be somebody. “He that works is a king,” historian Thomas Carlyle wrote 150 years ago.

“You’ve seen the General Electric commercial where the guy opens his shirt and the words there say ‘G.E. is me’?” Mason asks. He’s an associate professor of human factor psychology at USC. “That’s the way it is with most men. They are what they do, and what they do is what they are.

“Without a place to go, a place to be, they think of themselves as nothing.” Mason pauses. “You’re going to see deep depressions here and marriages breaking up. You’re going to see suicides.”

“How do you feel about it all?” I asked Bach.

“Hurt,” he said. “Betrayed.”

The pain was the kind of anguish a provider feels. I know that pain. I’ve felt it too. Betrayal is a different matter. I’m a skeptic and never have believed company promises.

But Bach believed GM when its leaders suggested that if they adopted the Japanese-style team concept of producing cars, the Van Nuys plant might last forever.

Bach believed a leader in the United Auto Workers who said GM autos would be produced out of the country only “over my dead body.”

“Not only did the company announce it was moving production of the Camaro and Firebird to Canada,” Bach says, “but now they’re shutting down the plant completely. Over whose dead body are they going to do it?”

The GM workers I spoke with see themselves about to be lost in statistics too terrible to contemplate. They see their humanity about to become another blip in the unemployment rate.

These are people unwilling to settle for the dole. These are the ones Walt Whitman sang of. They’ve built their lives out of muscle and sweat.

Now what will become of their homes in the suburbs, their cars, their RVs, their boats, their vacations, their roles?

“The heart has been torn out of us,” Brian Cox says. “There’s no light at the end of this tunnel, only darkness.”

And the darkness, for those facing the uncertainty of no place to go, is getting deeper with every passing day.