Take the buyout or stay at Ford? Either way, workers are nervous
lounge in Brownstown Township, Mich., mulling the biggest gamble of his
life. Ford Motor Co. had offered him and its 75,000 other U.S. hourly
workers a choice of buyout packages. One option: A $100,000 lump-sum payment
to sever his relationship with Ford. Taking the money would mean no job and
no health care. For Swiercz, 40, who has two ex-wives and pays $157.50 each
week in child support for his 14-year-old son, taking the buyout would be
the equivalent of a third divorce. The math just didn't work. The cheapest
health insurance he found cost $450 a month. With child support, he'd pay
$1,080 each month before he paid rent or put gas in the car. Like all hourly
workers, he had to make a decision by Nov. 27. He chose to stay on the
production line at Ford's Woodhaven Stamping Plant, where he's weeks away
from hitting 11 years seniority. He's gambling that the plant will stay
open. He's gambling that, if it does, enough workers will take buyouts so
Ford can avoid layoffs there. He's gambling that a worker from a closing
plant who has more seniority won't bump him off the job. For hourly workers
at Ford, making a decision on the buyout offers required a combination of
economic calculations and soul searching. Some 38,000 Ford workers roughly
half of Ford's U.S. hourly work force said they would take one of Ford's
eight buyout packages. The workers who are staying are every bit as nervous
as those starting over. The buyout and the future have been the dominant
topic of conversation at the Woodhaven plant for six months, Swiercz said.
"You talk to 25 people a day, that's what 10 people are talking about," he
said. "Not, 'How are your kids?' or 'What are you doing for Christmas?'
(It's) 'You taking the buyout? Everybody's worried about everything now."
Hard times at Ford, General Motors Corp., DaimlerChrysler and their
suppliers mean hard times for Michigan, where all three are based and where
the auto industry dominates the economy. The state is on track to lose
336,000 jobs between mid-2000 and the end of 2006, the longest stretch of
job losses since the Great Depression.
Contracts expire between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three in 2007,
and some argue union concessions are the only way the Big Three can compete
with Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.
UAW critics say union work rules make it nearly impossible to fire a bad
worker. A 21/2-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, said Donald Grimes, an
economist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Labor and Industrial
Relations.
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. 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 years. She's popped her knee, she's popped her back,
she cut herself, she got hit in the head with a Mustang.
Allison, 41, 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.
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