Pink Slips

 “Autopsy of an Engine – and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant” by Lolita Hernandez, 2004

This is a rare take on factory work, especially makin' Thunderbirds – or in this case, Caddies. It starts as lyrical, female, musical, personal, poetic.  In parts it’s like the Cadillac plant on Clark Street in Detroit is the scene of something out of West Side Story – not the heavy-beat blues of the film Blue Collar, but a complicated happy dance, a chorus of labor.  The Dead Rock Gods are not singing here, as depicted by Ben Hamper in Rivet Head. It is not The Bob Seeger System and the battalion of hard-rockin' Detroit musicians – the Stooges, Mitch Ryder, Ted Nugent, Grand Funk, Alice Cooper, Funkadelic, the MC5 and Rodriquez.  It's not CREEM magazine.  It's more Berry Gordy's Motown, more Trinidadian, more black Baptist church, more Latin salsa, more dancing, not slugging, singing, not thumping.  And perhaps more acceptable to those who were never there.

GM closed this plant, shipping the work off to factories in Livonia, Michigan and places further away.  In a way it is a funeral for lives and work lived years in a giant, clanging building, now disappeared, desiccated and destroyed. They stripped it empty and dark, to the smokestacks, even to the light-fixtures and coffee machines.

The Cadillac workers took pride in making the highest end American car. 8 cylinder Broughams, de Villes, Eldorados, Fleetwods and Sevilles rolled out until the last body dropped onto the last chassis in a massive event inside the plant.  Most of the characters are women workers – one late for work, one confused about discrimination, one a maker of pound-cake, one losing it to madness, many quiet and hardworking, one doing an ‘autopsy’ of a Cadillac engine after it has failed.  She takes ownership of her many tools, her work station, her investigation of each part of the inert motor. Hernandez clearly writes from personal experience, as she spent 20 years in this plant and 30 years at GM.  The level of detail and memory would otherwise be almost impossible.

The proletarian stories become more grounded.  Workers, blue and white collar and union committeemen worry if they will get another job at their age. There are romances, spurned and distant. Drinking on the job is not rare.  Many ‘work families’ are formed.  The smell of metal and oil is ever-present.  The level of noise is constant.  Each part of the cars and factory architecture gets its moment.  There is a death on the job … and rats.  Hernandez especially focuses on the last days of the Clark Street plant and its final car – a blue Fleetwood, born and died December 18, 1987 amid a massive crowd of workers who sang the Steam lyrics:  “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey hey hey, goodbye…”

Anyone who has spent years in a factory and been there for the end will appreciate this book in their bones.  This is not really a political book so much as a personal one.  Those who have not gone through something like this will still recognize the significance of losing a family, a home and their job all at the same time.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The Flivver King” (Sinclair); “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Night Shift,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “Red Baker,” “A Contract is a Contract,” “Twin Cities Factories,” “Labor Day,” “NAFTA” and “USMCA,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism.”

And I bought it at May Day's excellent Cut-Out and Used Section!

The Cultural Marxist

October 5, 2022