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.
But her back, shoulders and wrists are riven with arthritis. She battles depression. And even though she made auto parts for 31 years, she’s afraid to drive on interstate highways. She spends most of her time at her home in Pendleton, Ind., a tiny town 35 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
A single mother, Barber raised three children on an autoworker’s wage. More recently, she cared for her brother as he died.
Despite her burdens, her car and 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.
“I can make it on my pension,” she said, “but not if they cut my pension in half.”
Barber saw what bankruptcy did to steelworkers’ 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.
“They are scared . . . and they are frustrated,” she said. “Trying to decipher all of the changes is maddening.”
Barber started work 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 Carlyle Group and Onex Corp. in August 2007.
For years, she molded bumper fascias — cleaning the molds, removing hardened bumpers, then trimming, sanding and waxing — again and again and again.
Barber also repaired machines, but over time, the parts she needed vanished, as management embarked on what seemed to her inexplicable inventory purgings.
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.”
With every downsizing and outsourcing, housing foreclosures mounted, cities disintegrated and banks lurched closer to insolvency.
Quarter by quarter, Barber endured her employers’ misguided cost-cutting and watched how it slowly generated more consumers who could no longer afford 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. “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.”
Bankruptcy may be part of the 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 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at .
