At 52, Theresa Barber finds herself among the 400,000 workers that the auto industry has shed over the past year.
Since retiring in June after 31 years at General Motors Corp. companies, she has dreamed of becoming a nurse: “Instead of machines, I could be working on people.”
But her back, shoulders and wrists writhe with arthritis. She battles clinical depression. And, even though she made auto parts for 31 years, she is afraid to drive on interstate highways. So she spends most of her time at her home in Pendleton, Ind., a tiny town about 35 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
“I’ve been here all my life,” she said. “I am a small town girl.”
A single mother, Barber raised three children on an autoworker’s wage. More recently, she cared for her brother as he died.
Despite her life’s burdens, her car and her credit cards are paid off, and her mortgage balance is down to $60,000. But now global economic and political forces threaten to break her down like the machines she used to repair.
“I can make it on my pension,” she said, “but not if they cut my pension in half.”
Barber saw what bankruptcy did to steel workers’ pensions. She keeps herself sane by joining in union rallies and moderating a website, , where she reads the thoughts of more than 1,300 autoworkers.
“I am a 2007 hire,” writes Stinger3365. “I am currently laid off from the Defiance GM powertrain. My question is, ‘Should I have taken the buyout?'”
Someone named JackBone answers: “Lick yer wounds and carry on.”
“They are scared as hell and they are frustrated,” she said. “Trying to decipher all of the changes is maddening. Nothing is the same that it used to be.”
Barber started work on July 11, 1977, at a GM division called Guide Lamp, which ultimately became part of Delphi Corp., and then was sold twice after that. She also worked at Allison Transmission Inc., which GM sold to private equity firms, the Carlisle Group and Onex Corp., in August 2007.
For years, she molded bumper fascias – cleaning the moulds, removing hardened bumpers, then trimming, sanding, and waxing – again and again and again.
“Most people lost their shoulders and their wrist doing this,” she said. “I know people who look like Frankensteins with the zipper marks on their bodies from surgeries they’ve had to have. I tried to look at it as exercise.”
Barber also repaired machines, but over time, the parts she needed vanished, as management embarked on what seemed to her inexplicable inventory purgings.
“We had what was called the stacker,” she said. “It was seven stories of spare parts. They emptied the stacker. They threw everything out.”
Year after year, she watched machines break and jobs shipped overseas.
“Pretty soon we’re operating in half-empty factories,” she said. “We didn’t even have enough jobs left to pay for building maintenance. Every time it rained, they would have to rope off huge areas. You just couldn’t walk through there. It was all flooded. It doesn’t make sense, the things that they did.”
Cutting expenses was always on the backs of the workers, while wasteful production line practices festered. With every downsizing and outsourcing, housing foreclosures mounted, cities disintegrated and banks lurched closer to insolvency.
Barber sees her retired colleagues turning to the wall, as in Wal-Mart and Walgreens. Or maybe they get a clerical job at the county courthouse.
“A lot of them just haven’t been able to make it,” she said.
She worries that her current husband, a machine repairman, could lose his job and health-care benefits at an Indianapolis auto plant. He has Type 1 diabetes. “His illness alone could devastate us financially,” she said.
Quarter by quarter, Barber endured her employers’ misguided cost-cutting, and watched how it slowly generated more and more consumers who could no longer afford to buy new cars.
“It’s not the fault of all the families and communities that supported manufacturing plants throughout the generations,” President Barack Obama said Monday, announcing his last-ditch effort to save the industry. “Rather, it’s a failure of leadership — from Washington to Detroit — that led our auto companies to this point ”
“I can’t promise you there isn’t more difficulty to come,” Obama said. “When a community is struck by a natural disaster, the nation responds to put it back on its feet. While the storm that has hit our auto towns is not a tornado or a hurricane, the damage is clear, and we must likewise respond ”
Bankruptcy, however, may still be part of that response. So now Barber has found something she finds more terrifying than driving on the interstate highway system: “I’m quite fearful of the news.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266, al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at
