‘Gypsies’ Travel to Keep GM Pension

It was the last place on earth Frank Macomber figured he’d be working. After 27 years with General Motors, after bouncing all over the country from one plant to another, he could hardly believe he was running a sewing machine at the company’s seat-cover facility, “doing a woman’s job,” as a fellow worker put it.

Worse, Macomber had trouble keeping up. On this December day, he even skipped group calisthenics at 5:57 a.m., just before the work alarm rang, so he could get in a few extra French seams.

“It’s like a nightmare. I’ve thought about giving up, but I just got to go on,” he said, referring not only to the sewing task but to a long, remarkable work journey that began at GM’s South Gate plant in 1969. A journey that hasn’t ended yet. In fact, Macomber has since moved to a GM plant in Indiana.

His experiences are shared by many of the 200 workers at Brea and the hundreds of thousands of graying auto workers nationwide who are trying to hang on for a few more years so they can retire with full pensions.

Warriors of the auto industry, they have survived plant layoffs and closures that have cast away a sea of younger workers, not to mention an occasional strike like the one at two Ohio brake plants last month. Thanks to old union rules and contract protections, they have not only clung to their jobs but today receive almost $20 an hour and excellent benefits.

But it all has come at a price.

Most of them took jobs at car plants, right out of high school, in the hometowns where they hoped to build their lives. Many figured they could retire before they turned 50 under GM’s 30 years-and-out system.

But cutbacks and factory shutdowns have pushed more than 100,000 GM production workers to relocate at least once or make extraordinarily long commutes to stay employed. Those like Macomber call themselves “GM gypsies” because they have traveled around the country to hold their jobs.

In their late 40s and 50s, they have managed to hang on to a measure of job security that has all but vanished in corporate America.

Workers who have been laid off may be envious because the gypsies at least have jobs.

But among themselves, they share cigarettes and painful stories--of drifting from place to place like migrants, of leaving behind pieces of their lives here and there.

GM officials won’t comment on the record about the gypsies, but privately they say GM has tried hard to accommodate workers’ needs within the bounds of its business needs and labor contract. “GM has acted very responsibly,” said a labor relations executive in Detroit.

But those at the Brea sewing shop--the last group of auto workers left in Southern California--are likely to be on the road again.

GM began production in Brea in the summer of 1994 as a kind of concession for shutting down its Van Nuys assembly factory two years earlier. But the Brea facility is scheduled to close; company officials say there is enough work only until mid-1998.

“At this point, we don’t have anything beyond that,” plant manager Kevin Quinlan said before showing a visitor around. “To speculate beyond that would be just speculation.”

If the Brea workers are shunted again, their moves will be long ones. Unlike workers in Michigan, where there’s a cluster of auto factories, the only GM assembly plant left in the West is in Fremont in Northern California, and openings there are rare. Some Brea workers hope to get jobs with a GM parts depot or battery operation in the Southland, but those small facilities also are filled with many senior employees.

“I don’t know what the options are,” said John Roberts. Now 54 and living in Huntington Beach, Roberts has been through South Gate, Van Nuys, Indiana and Brea. During the last move, he says, his wife suffered a heart attack.

“I’m at the point now . . ., “ he said, his words trailing off. “I’ve been shuffled here and there. I’m tired.”

Going the Distance

Even now, workers in Brea travel great distances to their jobs.

Manuel Cortez, 46, begins his commute at 3:30 a.m., taking the winding, hilly road from his home in Santa Clarita to a parking lot next to the razed GM factory in Van Nuys.

There, he meets a dozen others. Carrying pillows and lunch buckets, they load into a white rental van, and with nary a word among them, travel 80 minutes to this remote area in northeast Orange County.

“It’s strenuous, it’s nerve-racking,” said Cortez, who usually drives. But he added: “It’s still a lot closer than 2,200 miles,” a reference to the two years he spent in Anderson, Ind.

Cortez and dozens of other Van Nuys veterans chose Indiana because it was closer than GM plants in Baltimore and West Virginia, where workers also were needed.

Even so, he was forced to rent out his Santa Clarita house, his wife gave up her good-paying job at Lockheed, and their three children lost their friends and school lives. Cortez, who had been a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, said the most painful part was being so far away from his four sisters and his ill parents, who died during his absence. “It was really rough,” he said. “I really missed my family.”

The diaspora of auto workers began more than a decade ago; the shutdown of the Van Nuys plant in August 1992 was among the latest. Employees who could retired, some took buyouts, some stayed put and went to school, collecting GM and unemployment benefits. Hundreds of others scattered across the nation to secure jobs at other GM plants, hoping to rack up years toward retirement.

After 30 years, GM workers are entitled to full pensions, about $2,000 a month. Those who retire earlier get only half.

Oscar Burrell, a tall, slender man with a wisp of white beard, went to Shreveport, La., when the Van Nuys plant closed, leaving behind his wife and young son in San Dimas.

He moved into a tiny apartment in town but had heard tales of how Californians were treated, so he removed the license plates from his car. He and his wife, who stayed in Southern California to keep her job, alternated visiting each other every month, an expense that ate up their savings.

His work life was miserable. At the time, Burrell had more than 20 years of service with GM, but as far as plant seniority went, he was on the bottom. At the Van Nuys factory, he drove a forklift truck, one of the most desired jobs.

But in Louisiana, he was assigned the toughest task: working in the pit, reaching overhead with a power drill to tighten the body of a truck to its chassis as it rolled down the line.

“I was sore and hurting all over,” recalled Burrell, an Alabama native who joined GM at the Van Nuys facility in 1970. “It was pure hell. I mean pure hell.”

After 22 months, Burrell got word one Friday evening that a job had opened for him in Brea. He says he packed up in two hours and made the 18-hour drive home in what seemed like half that time.

Burrell, now 46, says his family is still getting over the financial and emotional strains of the long separation. “We’re just beginning to recover,” he said.

Life at the Brea Plant

Knowing their travails, GM and the United Auto Workers union have tried to create a happier, healthier work climate at Brea. They have put an exercise area inside, picnic tables and a basketball hoop outside and created a sophisticated computer training room where workers can learn new skills. But few make use of it all.

The facility is remarkably tidy for a garment shop, and it has all the accouterments of a defense operation--controlled areas, pin-ups of productivity charts, work modules flanked by lights that flash when the system breaks down.

Behind the plant is a row of white Chevrolet trucks, parked there so workers can see where their seat covers will go.

Even so, the plant is a caldron of anger and bitterness. Many workers have never forgiven GM for closing the Van Nuys plant; others complain that the pace of the sewing work is relentless. “There are a lot of mad folks here,” said Tyrone Tyler, 42, though he adds that he isn’t one of them.

Despite having been transferred to Kansas 13 years ago--during a divorce and a separation from his baby--and a subsequent relocation to Baltimore, Tyler says he is thankful for the job he has.

“For all the moving and relocating I’ve been through,” he said, “GM’s been good to me and my family. I didn’t go to college, yet I’ve lived with an attorney who didn’t make as much as I did.”

As Tyler spins his tale, he acknowledges that others have had it worse. Take for instance his buddy Frank Macomber.

When Macomber trekked to California in 1968 he fled North Dakota and a stepfather, a sharecropper enraged by alcohol and battles with epilepsy.

Macomber, by then a Vietnam veteran, was just 18 when the doors to GM’s factory in South Gate were wide open. He entered in August 1969, never planning to make auto work a career. But in 1974, he married Mary Davis, and with his $6-plus hourly wage, the couple had little trouble grasping the middle-class dream.

The Macombers, who had two children from her previous marriage, bought a three-bedroom ranch-style house in Pomona for $21,000 on a Veterans Administration loan. With a swing in the backyard and two cars (a Caprice sedan for him and a red convertible Corvair for her) in the garage, the family fell into the rhythms of suburban life.

Mary Macomber was a stay-at-home mom. In the summers, they visited her parents in Missouri. They had two more children. To boost their income, Mary took a job at South Gate alongside her husband in 1978.

But in mid-1979, their world began to crumble. South Gate erased the second shift and the Macombers lacked the seniority to hold their jobs. So they moved with their two teenagers and two infants to Oklahoma City to work at GM’s assembly plant there. “Oooh, it was awful,” Mary recalled. People there “got in our face and said we took away their jobs. They said, ‘Go home.’ ”

Frank says they called workers like him “prune pickers from California.”

The Macombers put in for a transfer. Two years later, South Gate recalled them. It was a happy, but short-lived, return. In the next year, 1982, South Gate closed for good--a victim of its age, distance from GM suppliers and the auto maker’s excess capacity. The Macombers packed up again, this time heading for Shreveport, La.

They found a home there. “The people were wonderful, and the kids adjusted well,” said Mary. Their oldest boy fell in love and got married. Both Frank and Mary enjoyed their work.

But the humidity made Frank and his younger son, Frank Jr., miserable--the father bothered by sinuses, the son by asthma. So the Macombers put in for jobs at the joint GM-Toyota Nummi plant in Fremont. In mid-1986, the Macombers said, they were told that jobs were waiting for them there.

When they arrived at the personnel office in Fremont, however, managers told them the plant had a hiring freeze and could not take them in. Left on the streets with three children, Frank took a job at a lumberyard and Mary earned money by walking picket lines for grocery clerks. They lived in a double-wide mobile home.

After six months, the Macombers pushed south to the San Fernando Valley, as Frank’s seniority enabled him to land an opening at the Van Nuys plant. Mary was never recalled. Yet for five years, their lives seemed relatively stable, save for occasional layoffs during which Frank received nearly his full pay.

But in August 1992, Van Nuys suffered the same fate as South Gate. The Macombers say union leaders told them to grab a job at a GM components plant in Anderson, Ind., because the contract was expiring and a new labor agreement held no guarantees. They went in June 1993, with GM paying them $1,000 and a state program taking care of moving expenses.

“They loved Anderson,” Mary said of her two younger children. “My boy [Frank Jr.] got to do theater work there, and the girl [Michelle] had quite a few friends.” They were in tears after their parents broke the news to them in November 1994: They must return to Southern California because of concerns that the GM components plant might be sold.

So in winter 1994, they journeyed back to California so Frank could work at the Brea plant. Four months later, just after his 18th birthday, Frank Jr. packed up his car and returned to Anderson. His younger sister soon followed. Their mother--torn between her children and her husband--went back and forth.

Brighter Future

Finally, a few months ago, things turned around for the Macombers.

Frank returned to Indiana, managing to get a transfer to a truck assembly plant in Ft. Wayne. The family is reunited, living in a 106-year-old house.

Now 47, Macomber has five years left in his long pursuit of retirement. He hopes it will be in Indiana. But he knows he can’t count on it.

“I’m getting close to retirement, that part feels good,” he said. “But it’s still scary.”

He stuck with GM, he says, because by the time the industry began to convulse, he already had invested too many years in the company. He also knew nothing out there would pay a high school graduate as much.

As he reflects on his hardships, he points the finger at the company and the union, saying they should have told him upfront about plant closings. But he also blames himself for having placed his trust in them.

“I don’t feel like I owe my whole life to the company,” he said. “Yet I put my whole life into it. We shouldn’t be moving around all over. The plant shouldn’t be closing.”

Frank and Mary Macomber had wished better things for their children. But with all the moves, they were never able to provide a steady home or save enough to send them to college.

Frank Jr., now 19, works as a manager at Shoney’s Restaurant, making $5.50 an hour. He has told his parents that he wants a job with GM. They shake their heads.

“If he says he wants to work for GM, I wouldn’t stop him,” said Frank. “But he needs to know he can’t count on it to last forever.”

“I’d like him to join somewhere else,” added Mary. “But I doubt if any company is safe anymore.”