The auto industry's unemployed are migrating in droves
When the century was younger and Motown was Boomtown, jobs were for the picking on the conveyor belts of Detroit. Forrest Jones got one, leaving behind the dust of Piggott, Ark. So did Paul Youker's father, trading hard times in New York to be a security guard for General Motors. Terrace Turner's father got another, moving north from Mississippi.
But in just a generation, the boom has gone bust. Haifa million auto-related jobs have been lost since 1979, and migration today is away from Motor City, not toward it. Turner, 29, has gone to Arizona to look for work: "That's what my father did when we moved up to Detroit." Youker, 28, an engineer with Chrysler's defense division, headed for Los Angeles and a higher-paying job with Hughes Aircraft. Jones' daughter, Anita Cousins, 41, has taken the path most traveled by departing Michiganders. She has followed the Lone Star beacon to the plenty of Texas.
Signs of the exodus are all over the industrial North, but they show especially in Michigan, where 20,000 workers run out of unemployment benefits each month.
On a Wednesday in Dearborn, home of Ford Motor Co., the unemployed arrive by the hundreds at the Little Professor Book Center. There they snap up the local bestsellers—the Sunday Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Light—and open to "Help Wanted."
Others head for employment agencies like Career Personnel Inc., in Southfield, where Owner Stanley Blum is doing a "phenomenal" business preparing resumes for people seeking jobs down South. Perhaps the only business doing better than placement agencies is the moving trade. United Van Lines transported 533 households from Michigan to Texas in 1980, up from 293 the year before. UHaul's one-way southbound traffic in rental trucks has been so brisk that it creates chronic shortages up North.
The signs are no less evident at the other end of the migration. Michigan license plates abound on the freeways of Houston, where a thousand newcomers —black, white, young and old—arrive each week. Resumes are piled high on the desks of employment counselors in Houston, where 70,000 new jobs were created last year. Local radio station KILT now promotes itself with the message: "If you're from Detroit... you've found your station in Houston." Apartment agents have installed WATS lines to serve out-of-state callers. The waterfront apartment complex near Houston, where Anita Cousins lives, is dubbed "Michigan Manor"; at one point it housed 23 Michiganders in its 43 apartments. An odd coincidence in the 1980 census came as no surprise to Texans: Detroit had lost 321,841 people; Houston had gained 321,457.
Some of the migrants come with jobs already lined up. Tal Gonyea, 20, of Detroit is one. His training as a computer technician earned him an offer straight out of college from Texas Instruments in Houston. Yet a surprising number arrive without plans. "Some just call from the bus station and ask how to get here," says Foley Collins, of the Texas Employment