Shortly past 8 a.m. on the first Friday of the 1980s, Wanda Paruch leaves her house on McDougall Avenue in Hamtramck, Mich., and sets out on the five-minute drive to work. Normally, she would make this trip three hours earlier, eat a cafeteria breakfast and start her job at 6 a.m. on the fifth floor of the Dodge Main Assembly Plant, putting glue on doors, cleaning out loose bolts and putting a plastic water shield and two pieces of felt into passing Aspens and Volares.
But this Friday there is no work. Around noon Thursday, a navy blue Dodge Aspen, No. 142 274, went by on its way down the jerky, rumbling assembly line as Dodge Main's last car. As it passed, small groups of instrument fitters, engine installers and wheel mounters cleaned up quietly and left. When the line finally came to a halt, nothing dramatic followed, no mass exodus, not even a final silence. Plant officials gathered around the blue Aspen for photographs, then drifted to the windows overlooking the Bismarck Gate to watch television crews clustered around departing workers, striving to capture their final mood—solemnity, or fear, or anger.
Today there is nothing to do but collect pay. Wanda Paruch, whose blond hair and broad pleasant face belie her 52 years, is only one of hundreds lining up early outside the gate on Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck's main street, in the subfreezing, clear morning air. She waves to old friends as they drift off, feeling only an elusive, half-real sense of loss. Above her loom massive gray factory walls with their vast mosaic of windows, painted-over green, cracked and dirty. Only one of the four black smokestacks exhales into the sky. The railroad tunnels that run beneath the building are empty, and the moaning central paint ovens have fallen silent.
The closing of Dodge Main came a half-year ahead of the schedule announced last May by the Chrysler Corp., hastened by disastrously low auto sales throughout the summer and fall. But like the majority of the Dodge Main workers turned loose into the bleak Michigan winter, Wanda is not too hard-pressed financially. Under a company/union agreement, workers with the greatest seniority will have first dibs on jobs elsewhere. (Many may go to the Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, a nearby facility that will produce Chrysler's new front-wheel-drive small cars for next fall.) Wanda has worked at Dodge Main for nearly all of the past 31 years, and soon will qualify for a lifetime monthly pension of $770. In the meantime, she and all of her co-workers are guaranteed either unemployment benefits that can add up to 95% of normal take-home pay, or else Trade Relocation Act funds that pay up to $250 a week for workers whose jobs have been lost because of foreign competition. With Ford soon to close a plant in Los Angeles, Uniroyal shuttering an aging tire factory in Detroit and other auto industry closings announced or rumored, many will need such financial cushions.