Despite the official end of the national recession, massive unemployment persisted for Detroit’s autoworkers amid huge disruptions in production. Frequent and prolonged layoffs had long since caused safety nets to fray. Most workers had exhausted their unemployment benefits, and few alternate employment options existed in Detroit. The unemployed lined up whenever there were openings, no matter the type of work, and they scrapped with one another, sometimes in violation of union contracts, to maintain access to scarce auto jobs. In contrast with the misery of so many autoworkers, Ford and GM managed to earn healthy profits, despite shutdowns caused by a national steel strike. Chrysler might have profited as well if not for a glassworkers strike that undercut its production. Automakers engaged in post–steel strike exuberance by increasing output, but inventories stockpiled, especially those of midsize cars, and unemployment remained high. The only bright spot in the industry, nationwide, was the trend toward small, fuel-efficient autos. The best chance for any employment in the industry was being part of the supply chains or assembly lines for Falcons, Darts, Valiants, or Corvairs. Even so, steady employment was far from guaranteed. In mid-1960 the U.S. Department of Labor declared Detroit to be in the “worst-off” category for the nation’s metropolitan areas. By the end of that year, auto work remained precarious in the Motor City.
* * *
Some signs indicated that 1959 would be a rebound year. Automakers ramped up production in early 1959, Ford earned record profits for the first quarter, and GM and Chrysler also posted significant gains from dismal 1958.1 Yet unemployment levels barely changed, with nearly two hundred thousand Detroiters out of work through late February. “We are victims of productivity,” declared Manatee Smith from Dodge Main Local 3. “Automation and increased efficiency have chiseled us out of our jobs.” Many business leaders continued to argue that a large number of laid-off Detroiters represented “fringe unemployment.” The Detroit economy was basically sound, according to that view, even though unemployment might be high. The real problem, the argument went, was a lack of labor mobility, attributable in part to seniority and pension provisions that locked workers into dependency on particular employers, reducing incentives to go “where the jobs were.” The Detroit News had long argued that the only answer to the area’s unemployment problem was “the gradual absorption of the displaced workers by other trades and businesses.” Likewise, the Free Press advocated the “relocation of surplus labor.” MESC director Max Horton reinforced the message: “If I were an auto worker unemployed for the last year or better I would start seeking a job in some other line of work.” Of course it was not clear “where the jobs were” for unskilled workers during the 1958 recession, or in its aftermath—Horton suggested picking fruit in western Michigan—but it did seem self-evident that if enough Detroiters gave up on the auto industry and left the area, local unemployment rates would decline to more acceptable levels.2
While Detroiters debated their future, Chrysler production came to a halt when a long strike at a key supplier, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, finally affected the auto firm. Although by early 1959 Pittsburgh Plate workers had been on the picket lines for several months, Chrysler had been shut down so often in late 1958 that it still had substantial glass reserves on hand. By mid-January Chrysler’s supply ran out, the company shut down most of its plants, and tens of thousands of workers headed into yet another month off the job. Nevertheless, conditions were so bad the previous year that Chrysler vastly outpaced its 1958 production and profits for the first quarter.3
Ironically, both the UAW and the MESC contributed to Detroit’s jobless ranks. The union continued to suffer from membership losses—down half a million, to 800,000, at the depths of the recession—because of lengthy, perhaps permanent, layoffs. Fewer employed members, of course, meant less dues money, and more than 100 UAW staff members had been laid off in 1958. Another 70 were let go in February 1959. Nearly 700 other union employees, including executive board members, took 10 percent wage cuts to try to balance the union’s budget. The MESC’s layoffs in March were not a result of decreased unemployment. The number of jobless Detroiters had actually risen to nearly 240,000 even with the resumption of Chrysler’s operations, but most of Detroit’s laid-off autoworkers had exhausted their benefits. Only 62,000 of those without jobs still qualified for unemployment checks, and stringing together the eligibility requirement of thirty-nine weeks of full employment in a twelve-month period seemed impossible. With less work at MESC offices, staff members were laid off. Most of them had been so busy for the past year, however, that they easily qualified for unemployment benefits.4
The job situation in Detroit was so dire that when the Kroger Company opened a new supermarket on the east side and accepted applications for seventy-five jobs, paying seventy-five dollars a week, six hundred people lined up in frigid temperatures hoping to be among the fortunate. “It was a madhouse when we got here,” recalled police officer Jack Gettinger, who was in charge of controlling the crowd. “We thought we were going to have a riot on our hands.” Things calmed down quickly when signs reading “No More Help Needed” appeared in the store windows. One of those left on the outside was Ewing Fulks, forty-nine, a laid-off welder who had worked ten years at Chrysler’s Outer Drive plant. “I still got four unemployment checks coming, but I’m worried,” he said. “I can’t find any work, even part time. I’ve been looking everywhere. I’d take anything.” His wife, Goldie, had a job at the local U.S. Rubber plant, or else his situation would have been desperate. J. V. Gann, thirty-five, also lost out at Kroger. He had worked for Studebaker-Packard until the company closed its Detroit operations in 1956. “Steadiest job I’ve had since was 39 days at one plant,” he said. “I’ve sold my car and the rent on our flat is only $65, but I haven’t paid that for two months.” Needing to support a family of four, Gann had no income besides disability payments of thirty-six dollars a month from the Veterans Administration for wounds suffered while fighting in Italy during World War II. “I haven’t been able to get unemployment compensation for a year and a half,” he said. “I haven’t given up, though. I guess it’s still better here than in Russia.” Kenneth Riddle, twenty-six, was laid off from his metal-finishing job at Chrysler’s Mack plant and had only been able to find seven weeks’ worth of work in the past year. He and his wife, Betty, twenty-two, had bought a house “when work was good,” he said, but they had great difficulty making the ninety-five dollar monthly payments. The Riddles had a three-year-old daughter and survived on Betty’s store-clerk paycheck of forty-five dollars a week. Betty Wilshire, twenty-eight, hoped for a supermarket position because her husband, John, thirty-one, had been laid off from his auto job in January 1958. “He hasn’t heard from Chrysler since,” she said. John managed to find work at another plant, but that lasted only two months. The couple had three children, nine, six, and three months. “We’ve only got two months of unemployment benefits left,” Betty explained. “I worked for a while after the baby came, but only part-time—four hours. And that was hardly enough to pay the baby sitter.” Mrs. Fairris Clow, forty-two, was also trying to make up for her family’s lost income. Her husband had been a tool-room superintendent at Hudson Motor Car Company and then had been part of American Motors’ small remaining Detroit contingent before he was laid off in February 1958. “He’s been everywhere and he can’t find anything,” Mrs. Clow said. “We’re living on unemployment compensation.” Margaret Gilliam had given up a secure job at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska to return to Detroit to help her mother and her stepfather, who had been laid off for over a year from his job at Ford. “We’ve been hungry,” Margaret admitted. “We’re behind in everything. Only thing we got coming in is what I get from day work.”5
There were countless thousands of comparable stories in the Detroit area, including that of Betty and Bob Haver. “People look at you and think to themselves, ‘If I were out of work, I’d find another job in a hurry,’” they commented. “You know you’re thinking something must be wrong with you because you have not found a job in 15 months.” That’s how long it had been since January 1958, when Bob lost his job as a sheet metal worker at B&S Fabricators, which supplied materials primarily to the Ford tank plant just west of Detroit. He had six years of seniority at B&S, having taken a position there after working at another supplier, the Venderbush Sheet Metal Company. “We heard rumors that Ford was going to cancel” its B&S contract, Bob recalled, “but when you’ve never been out of work, you do not worry too much. You figure you’re good and there’ll always be a place to work.” Before Bob was laid off, the couple had a few hundred dollars in savings; two cars, one of them paid for; and they owned a house, for which they had never missed a payment. They also had four children and a fifth on the way. “We sold a car, stopped bowling, cut all extra expenses,” Betty explained, “but didn’t really worry because we were sure Bob would go back by February.” Betty was furious at the notion that unemployment benefits made people too lazy to look for work. “He tried everything,” she said. “Companies rehire their own people before they hire new men. There must be a thousand men for every job.” “They say things will get better,” Bob noted. “We hear that things aren’t bad at all. But I’ve been to every plant in town and I’ve answered hundreds of ads, and I know. It’s getting worse. I can’t see the end of it.”
Bob tried selling cars, but that proved futile during the recession. He found a few weeks of work on an experimental sheet metal job, just enough to make a house payment, before he was laid off and dropped to the bottom of that company’s four-hundred-man recall list. Their creditors showed no mercy when the Havers asked for extra time. “We couldn’t believe their attitude,” Betty remarked. The family had to make critical decisions. Their youngest daughter had yet to receive polio vaccinations. “You can’t just walk into a doctor’s office with no money,” Betty explained. “We had the telephone taken out,” Bob said, “but put it in again, because we figured we might miss a call to work.” The family now relied on government surplus food—rice, flour, butter, cornmeal, dried milk, and, of course, cheese. Bob and Betty could not buy Christmas presents for their children, but a neighbor gave them candy. Another neighbor was a barber and offered Bob free haircuts. A friend who managed to work for two days bought the Havers a ham. “We’re living from day to day,” Betty said. “The television’s on the blink and we don’t use the car, but we play pinochle like mad. And we love each other. It’s just that we hate to see everything you’ve worked for disappear.”6
Robert Hager offered another example of how Detroiters managed during the 1958–1959 recession. Having moved to Detroit from Union City, Tennessee, in December 1955, at the tail end of the auto industry’s boom year, Hager had never experienced job stability as an autoworker. “During the past three and a half years,” he said, “I’ve been out more than I’ve been in.” Shortly after his arrival in Detroit he found a job at the GM transmission plant in Willow Run, but almost as quickly he was laid off. After a few months he was recalled, but that stint lasted only ten weeks. He found a job at Evans Products, an auto supplier in Plymouth, Michigan, where he ended up welding bicycles, but he was laid off six times in less than a year. He then landed at the Ford transmission and axle plant in Livonia, where he worked a few months before being laid off in December 1957. From then until the following October, by his own calculation, he had applied for 243 jobs at factories, stores, and shops in metro Detroit, as well as in Chicago and St. Louis. During those months he was single and lived with friends in an apartment rented by landlords who let him run a three-hundred-dollar tab for room and board. He needed his car to look for work, but he could not make the payments. Unlike the Havers’ creditors, Hager’s bank gave him extra time. He used to collect thirty dollars a week in unemployment benefits, but his eligibility had long since run out. While searching for work he spent time picking corn, hauling sod, and chauffeuring Lt. Governor John Swainson on the 1958 reelection campaign trail. Finally, in October 1958 he was called back to the Ford transmission plant. Confident about his future, he married his fiancé, Patty Ruth, but he was laid off again after five months. Within a few weeks he found a job as a handyman for the Burroughs office machine company, where he still worked in April 1959. Despite all that he had been through, or perhaps because of it, Hager considered himself to be a Detroit success story. “My recent experiences should give confidence to the many men and women who are still without a job,” he said. Whether or not Hager’s story proved inspirational, it certainly illustrated the instability and insecurity experienced by so many would-be autoworkers.7
Older Detroiters, especially those left behind when auto plants closed, rarely experienced good fortune. Jean Velden, sixty, lost his job at Hudson shortly after it merged with Nash. He and three thousand others like him, he said, had been “looking all over for work and with a very few exceptions—no luck. Some of us have taken odd jobs, fixing garage doors or doing anything to stay active.” John McDaniel, fifty-seven, became permanently unemployed when Studebaker-Packard ended Detroit operations in early 1957. “The plight of the Packard worker is so disastrous,” he said, “that you wonder if some of them aren’t going to do bodily harm to themselves.” John Kief, fifty-one, had also worked for Studebaker-Packard. “The closest thing I’ve had to a steady job since then,” he said, “was 10 days work at the Michigan State Fair last October.” “They don’t want to hire old people,” explained a woman who would have preferred to work. “If they do, they give you such ridiculously low pay that, by the time you pay transportation, what have you got left?” An estimated 56 percent of former Packard employees, most of them between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four, were still unemployed in late 1959. About 85 percent of the last to be laid off were over forty years old. None of them had been hired at Packard after 1950. Only 20 percent of them had gone to high school at all, and 65 percent of them were second- or third-generation descendants of European immigrants. Most of them had home mortgages, which made them hesitant to relocate and ineligible for city welfare. African Americans, about 550 of the bitter-enders, had a higher unemployment rate in 1959 than did their white counterparts, but neither group had fared well. No matter their race, almost all of those who landed new jobs found them outside the auto industry and earned significantly lower wages. A study found that many of them were psychologically damaged by their loss of identity both as autoworkers and as part of a workplace community. Such evidence complicated the pronouncement by the Detroit Board of Commerce that the area’s autoworkers had enjoyed average earnings of $104.67 a week throughout 1958 and could look forward to 4 percent raises in 1959.8
Throughout these months, autoworkers competed with one another for whatever factory jobs became available. In one example, a group of ninety laid-off union members, most of them women, demanded fairness in the recall process at the Rouge, implicating Local 600 president Carl Stellato in the injustice. The protest group’s spokesperson, Etta Belle Warren, had sixteen years’ seniority at the plant, but her job had run only twelve weeks in the last year and a half. Desperate for a paycheck, she was certain that men with less seniority had already been recalled. Local 600 officials interviewed the protesting women and found positions for seventeen of them. Although Stellato conceded that more of the women might have been unfairly bypassed by lower-seniority male workers, he emphasized that these men had obtained their positions “by virtue of bidding for them after long years of service in relatively tough jobs. I am not about to reward these brothers by attempting to negotiate them back on their old and harder jobs with a pay cut.” Ironically, given his reasoning, Stellato accused the women of trying to become “a special privileged group.” Local officers obviously had no desire to challenge traditionally sex-segregated job classifications and run the risk of a male rebellion as well. For many years, seniority systems had done much to provide job security and fairness during layoffs and recalls, but they were increasingly under attack as so many desperate, unemployed autoworkers tried to support themselves and their families. Those with jobs, of course, protected them fiercely, even if they had obtained them illicitly.9
Another potential problem for Rouge workers was the domestic industry’s tentative shift toward smaller, cheaper, fuel-efficient vehicles to compete with foreign imports, especially those manufactured by Volkswagen, which had increased its U.S. sales from 28,000 in 1955 to 160,000 in 1960.10 When Ford announced that its new small car, the Falcon, would be assembled at the company’s Lorain, Ohio, plant, just west of Cleveland, as well as at facilities in Metuchen, New Jersey; San Jose, California; and Kansas City, Missouri, it was a stunning blow to the 10,000 to 14,000 Rouge workers still on layoff. The Rouge would focus on conventional, midsize Fords, which likely meant the loss of still more jobs from that plant if small cars took market share from standard models. “I’ve got twenty years’ seniority and shouldn’t have to worry about my job,” said one concerned autoworker. “But with these small cars coming you can’t tell which way things will go. No one really knows where he stands.” Many shared the opinion of a Ford worker who lamented, “We’ll be lucky if we get eight months’ work a year from now on.”11 When Carl Stellato led hundreds of protesting Local 600 members in front of the Rouge, Ford officials paid no attention. After all, many other UAW members, in Ohio, New Jersey, California, and Missouri, approved of their decision. Although they wanted as much production as possible in their plants, union leaders in Detroit were by no means certain that the Big Three’s compact cars would sell. Local 3 president Pat Quinn scoffed at the news that the Chrysler Valiant and Dodge Dart would be built at the Dodge Main: “Look at all the hopes Ford had for its Edsel, and look what a flop it was.” “Leave Detroit,” Quinn advised a gathering of 4,000 unemployed union members. Anyone with less than ten years’ seniority, he warned, should not expect to be recalled to work. For the 230,000 jobless autoworkers who stayed in the area, the UAW set up nine service centers to offer advice on “unemployment compensation, medical care, welfare, garnishments and repossessions, and obtaining surplus food.”12
For all of the autoworkers’ misery, by certain numbers the industry continued to do well in the first half of 1959. GM came “within a hairsbreadth” of its best half year for sales, measured in dollars, and made significant profits ($590 million). Ford reported record profits ($285.9 million), based on vehicle sales to dealers, only slightly below 1955’s all-time high. Chrysler boasted that its first half sales of 539,244 autos, 44 percent above 1958’s total, offered the “most emphatic proof yet” of its “recovery from the recession.”
Big Three executives were concerned, however, about contentious contract negotiations in the steel industry. The United Steelworkers pledged to shut down mills that accounted for 90 percent of national production if they could not reach an agreement by mid-July. Anticipating a strike, automakers ordered as much steel as they could stockpile, even though they had limited control over their destinies. Just as in the past, their efforts would be in vain if their thousands of parts suppliers did not have adequate stocks. With at least twenty types of steel required to make a car, it was nearly impossible to anticipate where shortages might occur and whether or not there might be alternative sources. “We’re only as strong as our weakest link,” commented an auto official. “If a supplier runs out of steel, we could be in trouble.”13
As expected, steelworkers shut down the industry on July 15. The main sticking point was the contract’s section 2-B, which gave workers a voice in challenging workloads and staffing levels set by steel companies. The union wanted to keep things as they had been, but industry negotiators demanded free rein to set production standards, with no recourse for employees. “Section 2-B is the reason” for the strike, explained a union steward at McLouth Steel’s Trenton, Michigan, plant, downriver from Detroit, that employed twenty-six hundred and supplied the auto industry. “If our representatives gave that up, they might just as well not come back.” The importance of section 2-B was fresh in the minds of McLouth’s workers. Earlier in the year they had complained about more than one hundred safety hazards in their plant, and three workers had been killed on the job in the previous six months. Management’s indifference to dangerous working conditions and union objections had led to a strike in January at all three Detroit-area McLouth facilities. Placing faith in management to make wise decisions struck steelworkers as foolish.14
As the steel strike entered its second month, the industry’s workers scrambled, in ways familiar to their auto counterparts, to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Of course Detroit-area steelworkers, whose production largely went to the auto industry, had honed those skills during the 1958 recession. Many headed back South to wait for a settlement. Others haggled with creditors and looked for part-time jobs. Merchants in downriver steel communities teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.15 In mid-September, when the steel strike entered its third month, ripple-effect layoffs had been limited mostly to railroad workers, truck drivers, and ore freighter crews that supplied the steel mills, but auto parts plants began to run low on metal. Since these factories generally produced four to six weeks in advance of final assembly, huge waves of strike-related auto layoffs began in late October, eventually reaching at least two hundred thousand. GM shut down completely in mid-November. After the steel strike ended in January 1960, after many twists and turns, automakers estimated that their production had been reduced by 600,000 vehicles, which was probably a blessing for them, because in that time dealers reduced their inventories of now outdated 1959 models from over 900,000 to a more manageable 440,000. In contrast, for autoworkers, and of course for steelworkers, the steel strike meant additional weeks or months without paychecks.16
Despite massive unemployment and lost production from the steel strike, both GM and Ford declared that 1959 had been their second-best year ever for profits. Among the Big Three, only Chrysler lost money in 1959, in large part because of the prolonged glass strike before the steel walkout. On the bright side, the company lost less money ($5.4 million vs. $34 million) than it had in 1958.17
* * *
Automakers celebrated the end of the steel strike by increasing their production goals and hinting that 1960 could be the industry’s best year ever. In late January even Chrysler’s plants ran full tilt, especially Dodge Main, because the Valiant and Dart compact cars proved popular. But the rosy predictions for 1960 proved accurate for barely a month. In early February the Big Three ratcheted back production schedules on all models except compacts. It turned out that there were few buyers for midsize cars, which were as essential as ever for overall profitability. Industry analysts blamed the need for retrenchment on “post–steel strike exuberance” that had gone to the automakers’ heads. In any event, dealers once again faced increasing inventories, heading toward one million, and profitless sales. These developments demonstrated that the problems that had plagued the industry in the 1950s had not been resolved. Most significantly, the ability to produce cars was still not matched by the means or willingness to purchase them.18
Frustrated by so many lackluster years, Chrysler threatened to leave metro Detroit if the company did not receive relief from what it considered to be an excessive tax burden. If the company made good on its threat, as much as 40 percent of the area’s Big Three auto employment would disappear. Although Chrysler executives did not mention wage and benefit costs among their complaints, a University of Michigan research team, led by William Haber, concluded that those expenses, along with high unemployment benefit rates, discouraged employers from doing business in Michigan. To the economists, state and local taxes did not seem to be a major contributor to operating costs in Detroit. After all, Chrysler paid only $14 million in local property taxes in 1959. But in tough times the tax burden did spark feelings of ingratitude in automakers, the researchers concluded, and added to “a fairly widespread impression, if not conviction, that Michigan does not offer a ‘good climate’ for industry.”19
The best hope for sustained auto employment in 1960 seemed to be working on small cars, which claimed a quarter of domestic sales in the first three months of 1960. Indeed, if not for the booming sales of compact cars, the industry would have been in extremely difficult shape. Finding a job in a supply and assembly network related to compacts, however, was a matter of fortuitous timing and location. The Dart, assembled at Dodge Main, by itself doubled Dodge Division sales in the first quarter of 1960 compared with 1959 (117,859 vs. 53,887). The Chrysler Valiant, the other small car produced at Dodge Main, also sold well (71,586). But total employment at Dodge Main during this surge stood at thirteen thousand—up from a low point of seventy-five hundred in 1959, to be sure, but only about half of 1955’s total. GM’s Corvair (93,880 sales in the first quarter of 1960) and Ford’s Falcon (126,133) were the other main Big Three entries in the small car market. They provided fairly steady work at GM’s Willow Run plant and at Ford’s Lorain, Ohio, factory. In addition, during the first three months of 1960 American Motors sold over 100,000 Ramblers, which led the domestic small car surge in the mid-1950s and helped bring profitability to the company, for the first time, in the midst of the 1958 recession. Solid Rambler sales provided relatively steady work at the company’s Kenosha, Wisconsin, plant, including jobs for a few hundred displaced former Hudson employees from Detroit.20
Solid statistics for small car production were little solace for autoworkers assigned to produce midsize models. Employment at the Rouge dropped from thirty-six thousand to twenty-nine thousand in the first few months of 1960 as sales of standard Fords fell 34 percent. Workers in the foundry and the engine plant needed twenty-six years of seniority to stay on the job. “We not only need more work but we want to persuade the company to balance out available jobs,” said Local 600’s Carl Stellato. “At some Detroit-area plants, for instance, they are working six and seven days a week while high-seniority people at the Rouge, who could do the same jobs, are laid off.” Stellato found Ford executives unresponsive to his pleas, perhaps because the company was making record first-quarter profits. Paralleling assembly patterns, companies that supplied parts for compacts thrived while those that contributed to midsize cars suffered. For example, Peninsular Metal Products Company, which had prospered when hood ornaments were in style, lost business when consumers began to prefer bare-bones compacts. Peninsular eventually dropped auto parts production, putting another five hundred Detroiters out of work.21
Although output and employment varied considerably from plant to plant, aggregate totals indicated troubles ahead. Despite the popularity of small cars, overall dealer inventories remained above one million in early April, and sales rates indicated that it would take at least several months to make significant reductions in those stockpiles. April, May, and June were supposed to be high-production months, the long-outdated conventional wisdom went, but instead unemployment rose in the auto industry and prospects were not good for early recalls. Making matters worse in auto-dependent communities, another class of high school students was about to graduate into a dismal entry-level job market. Low demand for unskilled workers, which was a growing population with baby boomers about to come of age, caused great concern. University of Michigan researchers did not anticipate anything close to full employment in the next few years. Even if education and retraining were easily available, their report noted, the demand for people with professional and technical skills was not great enough to absorb the large and increasing number of job-seeking Detroiters.22
It was no surprise when a study conducted in blue-collar Detroit neighborhoods revealed that “the most constant concern among men who work for a wage in Detroit is the threat—or the grim reality—of unemployment.” The reporters found a “general sense of frustration” among factory workers “over their bleak economic future.” Even a young GM employee who worked on Corvairs was getting only three days of work a week. “A lot of people are beginning to wonder if we still have a union,” remarked a laid-off, fifty-five-year-old Chrysler worker. “The company seems to be able to do what it wants.” Conditions on the job could also be brutal. “I used to hear friends at Chrysler complain and I told them it was just because the company was trying to make them work for a change,” said a young millwright, who found a temporary job at a major auto supplier. “Now that I’ve gone to Budd I know it’s different in the plants. Speedup! The way they push those old guys is criminal. The company’s got us over the barrel.” At this point many autoworkers no longer gave priority to higher wages. “Raise the pensions and lower the retirement age,” suggested a Ford skilled tradesman who was still two years away from eligibility. “Give the younger men the jobs. The younger men are the ones who buy the houses, the cars and the television sets.” There was continued sentiment as well in favor of the thirty-hour-week plan, but there was still no chance that the auto companies would entertain the idea. The U.S. Department of Labor confirmed what jobless Detroiters had been saying when it placed the metropolitan area in the “worst-off” category, indicating “substantial and chronic unemployment,” defined as “at least 50 per cent above the national average for three of the preceding four calendar years.”23
By the middle of the year, auto production remained high, unemployment continued at around 10 percent, and inventories piled up, awaiting buyers. As one report described the situation, Detroit’s economy was “a baffling conglomerate of millions of sales, paychecks and layoffs. Clues to the puzzle are found in a welter of statistics, comparisons and indices, which sometimes appear contradictory. What IS happening? Which way ARE we headed?” Downtown department store sales were up significantly, while unemployment remained well above one hundred thousand and the Common Pleas Court processed thousands of garnishment and repossession claims.24 In another confusing twist, a major Big Three wildcat strike caused minimal disruption in Detroit, highlighting to some extent the effects of decentralization. Ford Falcon production stalled in July when thirty-four hundred workers at a crucial parts-stamping plant in Walton Hills, a Cleveland suburb, struck over unresolved workload complaints. The walkout immediately resulted in the shutdown of a Falcon assembly plant in nearby Lorain, as well as operations in New Jersey, California, and Missouri. Plants in Brook Park and Lima, Ohio, that produced engines for Falcons, also had to suspend operations. Because of subsequent parts shortages, midsize-car assembly plants in Atlanta, Dallas, St. Paul, and in Chester, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia, were closed. Some twenty thousand Ford workers were laid off because of the Walton Hills strike, but hardly any of them lived and worked in Michigan. Illustrating another key change, when GM significantly expanded Corvair production in September, it required only a modest increase in employment: eighty jobs at Detroit’s gear and axle plant, fifty at Livonia’s spring and bumper plant, and seventy-five on assembly at Willow Run. Another major Corvair production boost, announced in November, required no increase in the Willow Run workforce of twelve hundred. The 1955 boom had required tens of thousands of new hires to ramp up assemblies, but that was no longer the case. The unpredictability and unevenness of auto work were also evident in mid-November, when Ward’s Automotive Reports revealed that eight assembly plants were operating on overtime shifts to meet demand while eight others were shut down for lack of purchasers.25 Even Dodge Main was closed, despite previously strong sales for Valiants and Darts. The company announced that the mass layoffs were a necessary “adjustment to field inventories.” As a reporter translated, “This means Chrysler has more cars than customers.” Aggregate auto production figures showed a booming industry, with the second-best November ever, behind only 1955. Yet unsold inventories climbed steadily and again approached the million-car threshold. Consequently, short weeks and layoffs returned throughout the Ford and Chrysler networks. Another ominous sign appeared when Great Lakes Steel ordered a ten-day shutdown “for lack of orders” after operating for many weeks at barely over half capacity. Output at Great Lakes Steel, a major supplier to the auto industry, was a reliable indicator of future vehicle production. Standard & Poor’s confirmed the bad news, predicting that the auto industry’s outlook was “not encouraging, for at least the forepart of 1961.” Ward’s Automotive Reports concurred, noting reduced production schedules for the New Year, with “appropriate” layoffs and short weeks.26 The postwar boom remained elusive.