Life After Carmaking
Displaced Atlanta Area Autoworkers to Put a New Economic Model to the Test

By Sholnn Freeman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

ATLANTA -- General Motors Corp. has announced plans to close a big minivan plant here sometime in the next two years, a decision that will cost 3,100 plant workers their jobs. But Vernon Jones, the chief executive of DeKalb County, still sees prosperity in the region's future.

Jones has his sights on the property for creation of "a whole new city" -- a mega-development with stores, offices, lofts and townhouses, and possibly even a performing arts center or a new soccer stadium. "It has the potential to triple the number of jobs that are being lost," he said.

Few American cities can absorb the loss of an auto plant, or two, quite like Atlanta. In addition to the GM site, Atlanta is losing a Ford Motor Co. car assembly plant that has 1,800 workers. The closings are part of the latest wave of downsizing in the American auto industry. GM and Ford are closing all or part of 26 plants over the next three years and cutting as many as 60,000 workers.

For the out-of-work, Atlanta provides prospects far outstripping the areas of the Midwest shattered by the auto industry's downturn. The Atlanta metro area's unemployment rate is 4.4 percent, compared with 7.6 percent in greater Detroit. The city is bolstered by its vibrant services sector, which has the potential to sweep in workers cast off by the decline in manufacturing. In its economic clout, Atlanta stands as a symbol of the transformation overtaking the American economy and illustrates the hope of thousands of blue-collar workers trying to adjust to a new landscape.

Still, even here, the transition from factory work is a precarious one. Workers are deeply anxious about leaving behind the factory world they know. With their plant skills, they are aware they might wind up as outcasts in the new services economy. And those who do succeed in making the shift face the hurdle of rebuilding their lives on salaries far below the $20 to $26 per hour they were earning on the assembly line.

Francis Elmore, one of the first women hired at the Ford plant back in the late 1970s, said she plans to take a $35,000 buyout package, retire and go to work part time in her daughter's law firm. "It's the best thing that ever happened to me," Elmore said.

Her co-worker, Willie McDonald, expects to take an even larger cash buyout, and the former Marine already has his sights on a new job with the Veterans Affairs Department once the plant closes later this year. "I'm one of the fortunate few. I've never been without a job in my life," he said.

Shane Gross is a 31-year-old second-generation Ford worker. His wife works at the plant, and this year they had their first child. Gross said he plans to return to college to finish a mechanical engineering degree. People inside the plant have mixed emotions, he said. "You see some people who are falling apart. Other people can't wait. We are looking at this as an opportunity to get out of Ford and get off the assembly line," he said.

Gross said he expects one day to make more money than he is earning at Ford. "Atlanta is quick. It's fast-growing. There's a lot of opportunity."

Economy of the Future?

In his 1989 documentary "Roger & Me," Michael Moore served up the unforgettable image of a downtrodden Flint, Mich., after a decade of downsizing by General Motors. Moore zeroed in on the eviction cops, the piles of garbage, abandoned blocks and the moving trucks heading out of town.

Atlanta has suffered plenty of hits itself. Delta Air Lines Inc., which is based here, is mired in bankruptcy proceedings. Three big military installations are closing, and corporate realignments have struck large Atlanta employers, including Georgia Pacific Corp., Scientific Atlanta Inc. and BellSouth Corp.

Still, while Flint held a powerful connection to America's industrial past, Atlanta looks more and more like the U.S. economy of the future.

Atlanta is a stronghold of the U.S. services sector, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Acceleration in the service economy continues to lift overall U.S. growth, despite the plant closings and job losses spinning out of Detroit.

Atlanta and its outskirts contain 2.6 million jobs and reported a gain of 69,000 jobs over the past year, dwarfing the 4,900 being lost at the two plants. Historically, Atlanta grew as a transportation hub. But the city has never been dependent on any one industry. Its higher-education system is vast and includes big institutions such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, which act as a catalyst for the creation of new businesses. The hospitality sector is also growing, as are the benefits of the "Katrina effect" -- the arrival of new convention-related business that would have otherwise gone to New Orleans.

At the Union Hall

To reach UAW Local 10, which represents the GM minivan plant, you can take Buford Highway north. Along the way, there are sprawling apartment communities, rows of shopping centers and plazas, retail superstores such as Burlington Coat Factory. Scattered in the mix are the occasional mercado and taqeuria , and Korean and Vietnamese restaurants with signs bordering the tops of buildings in Asian languages.

The Local 10 union hall is tucked off the highway, with its "Buy America" signs barely visible from the road. In the union hall, Debbie Goddard is counting down her years with General Motors -- by the hour.

She has more than 29 years and estimates that she has 300 hours to go before the 30-year retirement threshold. Goddard is worried about GM's recent troubles. "It could crash every dream I had for 30 years," she said. "I was looking forward to a long, healthy retirement with benefits."

Goddard and her friend Kathy Fowler aren't sure yet what they are going to do. They are awaiting more information from GM on buyouts.

But both women say they know one place they'll never end up -- working on the line inside the new Kia plant. In March, Georgia cut a deal with the Kia Motors Corp. to construct a new assembly plant near the Alabama state line, luring the South Korean automaker with subsidies totaling $160,000 per job.

Goddard has been a loyal UAW-GM employee for those nearly 30 years, mostly in the Doraville paint shop where she met her husband. Fowler's ties to GM run deeper: Both her father and grandmother held GM jobs.

"I can see us driving up to the Kia plant with our 'Made in America' tags. Yeah, right -- over my dead body," Goddard said and then laughed. "Those people will not give us a job. They will run from union labor."

Fowler won't consider it, either. "We egg those cars," she said.

Fowler said she hasn't slept a full night since GM announced a list of plant closings in November. Fowler said she might seem calm, but on the inside she feels edgy. At night, she says, she paces from window to window, smoking and thinking. A relocation means uprooting her mother, who has Alzheimer's. She said she tries to think of other problems to take her mind off the plant situation. "But I can get butt-deep into problems," she said. "This is the only problem -- our plant is shutting down."

The Model

While Fowler and Goddard lament, Jones says DeKalb County is moving forward. He and other Atlanta leaders say keeping the plant open had been a challenge for years. In the end, they said they had to conclude that no financial incentive package could save the 58-year-old plant from the forces of globalization.

Now Jones is eyeing the 166-acre plot where the Doraville plant sits. He calls it prime property. It is within Atlanta's Interstate 285 beltway and has two commuter rail stops. Jones is ready to draw up a master plan for the area, but a GM spokesman said the company hasn't decided what to do with the property.

Jones envisions a redevelopment district with commercial, residential, retail and entertainment components. Atlanta has a thriving and ambitious development community, and Jones sees a precedent in what emerged in midtown Atlanta from the environmentally contaminated grounds of a former steel mill that had been operating since the early 1900s. It's called Atlantic Station.

The mill had been cutting back in Atlanta for years as it moved operations to more efficient sites. The city created a master plan and waived taxes. A new bridge was built to connect the development to the highway and a 35-acre underground parking structure, topped by 1.2 million square feet of retail space, including an Ikea and a grocery store. Atlantic Station has 303 loft apartments, townhouses, a 101-room hotel, 14 restaurants and a 16-screen cinema. There is a 500,000-square-foot office building, with holes in the ground behind it for the construction of new towers.

One day last year, the son of a longtime steelworker showed up at Atlantic Station with a scrapbook of photos. They were pictures of men from an earlier time heating up furnaces and toiling in the mill's scrap yard. They now hang framed on the walls of Atlantic Station's corporate offices, in the lobby and in the conference room.