Ford Auto Workers Weigh Buyout Options

Rob Williams smiles at the Final Score Lounge in Brownstown Township, Mich., Friday, Dec. 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Paul Sancya - AP)

She went to a retirement party a couple weeks ago, looked around, and started to cry. The current generation of workers, the ones with cottages up north, boats, annual hunting trips, would be the last, she realized.

"It was a retirement party for a whole way of life," she said.

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A RICH DEAL

The UAW's critics say union work rules make it nearly impossible to fire a bad worker. A 2 1/2 hour lunch for a union worker at one of the bars near a plant wasn't unheard of. And union workers didn't pay a penny for health insurance until last year; now a family pays only $700 a year, Grimes said.

Auto workers counter that it's punishing work.

Cynthia Allison was a single mother raising a daughter, Donielle, and getting welfare before she got a job at Ford's Dearborn Truck plant. A cousin working for Ford in Illinois got her on a waiting list for a job; she waited two years to get it. Nothing had prepared her for how physically punishing it would be.

Her first day, "I kept saying, 'The money, Cindy, the money. A future for you and for Donny.' When I got off that 4 a.m. shift, each step I took, my head said, 'Boom. Boom. Boom.'"

She's stayed at Ford 12 more years. Auto plant equipment is designed to be ergonomically correct, but Allison is 5'2" and it's not ergonomically correct for her.

She comes home with bruises and has no idea how she got them. She's popped her knee, she's popped her back, she cut herself, she got hit in the head with a Mustang. She's on a first-name basis with the plant's nurse, Kathleen, who gets her through some shifts by giving her Biofreeze gel for sore muscles. Allison, 41, describes it as "the street version of Bengay."

Allison, who also raised one of her nieces, is taking the $100,000 buyout.

"I think I would be more afraid to stay than I am nervous to leave," she said.