As Flint goes, so goes the nation, employees say

Many see auto industry woes as part of a larger trend.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
FLINT, Mich. -- For Mary Aremia-Van Alst, the happiest day of her 10 years working at Delphi Corp. is easy to pinpoint: It was the day she got the job.
"I was ecstatic," she says, referring to that day in January 1995. The auto-parts company, then a division of General Motors Corp., was hiring in Flint for the first time in years.
The job offer was a passport to a paycheck that more than doubled her $10-an-hour wage at Citizens Bank.
It was also a ticket to a world where a working-class job could produce a middle-class lifestyle, with strong benefits and the money to send her kides to a Catholic grade school.
Now, with Delphi headed to bankruptcy court early next year, employees such as Aremia-Van Alst may have to take pay cuts of up to 50 percent. Suddenly, that solid standard of living appears to be hanging by a thread.
"I made a lot of life decisions based on the way things were supposed to be," she said, in between bites of an omelet at Toshi's, a diner near the Delphi plant. "Now they want to take half [of our pay] away from us."
Larger issues
What's playing out here in America's automotive alley may be the last gasp of the assumption that good factory jobs will last a lifetime. And workers here see it as something more: a warning that the American dream itself is at risk.
The outlines of the challenge go beyond the auto industry, they say -- global competition, shrinking union bargaining power, an eroding industrial base. If middle-class paychecks continue to be clipped, they wonder, what will drive the economy forward? What tax revenue will the government have?
"It's a national problem that's going to escalate," said Mary's husband, Neil Van Alst, who also works at Delphi.
Such views are fed, in part, by the circumstances around them. As lifelong residents of this area, Mary and Neil remember the Flint of their youth, then known as "Buick City," as a kind of automotive boomtown. GM employed as many as 80,000 workers in a city with a population barely twice that number, propelling prosperity far beyond the city limits.
Today fewer than 20,000 auto jobs remain here.
Unemployment, at about 7 percent, is well above the national average of 5 percent. The home of Buick no longer makes that brand. An arch downtown proclaims Flint to be "Vehicle City."
This is also among America's most heavily unionized states. More than 20 percent of Michigan's workers are trade union members, almost double the national average.
But if the concerns of Mary, Neil, and other auto workers here are rooted in local circumstances, they also have broader grounding.
Manufacturing at risk
Nationwide, unemployment remains low by historical standards, but sectors of the labor market, especially manufacturing, have been losing in recent years. And despite a growing economy, wages for nonsupervisory workers haven't been keeping pace with inflation.
Against that backdrop, the views of people like the Aremia-Van Alsts form one side of a sharp national divide over the future of the economy.
One view, espoused by free-market disciples, is that the nation's prosperity hinges on its extraordinary flexibility in deploying labor and investment. That explains its edge in job creation compared with Europe's tepid performance. But it comes with difficult adjustments, such as the one Delphi faces.
The other side contends that as global competition grows stronger, flexibility alone isn't enough. They call for new policies to help retain and build middle-class jobs. The recipes vary, but they generally urge keeping a closer watch on whether free-trade policies are fair, fixing a hodgepodge health insurance system, and greater public investment in promoting new industries.
GM chief's view
It isn't just the union rank and file who echo such views. GM chief executive officer Rick Wagoner, writing this week in The Wall Street Journal, said U.S. manufacturing faces "fundamental challenges," including soaring health-care costs and unfair trading practices by foreign rivals -- such as an artificially weak Japanese yen -- that a company such as GM can't solve on its own.
"Some say we're looking for a bailout. Baloney," Wagoner wrote. He conceded that many of GM's problems the company must face on its own. But "what we want ... is the chance to compete on a level playing field."
No city symbolized GM's past prosperity -- accounting for more than half of the U.S. car market in the years after World War II -- like Flint.
And no region is more loyal to "made in the USA," at least when it comes to cars. It's possible to drive the 80-odd miles from Detroit to Flint without seeing a single foreign nameplate on the road.
But Flint's population has declined since 1980, and its prized jobs have been steadily disappearing. GM plans to stop production at an engine facility, one of its several remaining plants here, in 2008 as part of a recently announced downsizing.