It began 41 years ago when a meandering drive through then-rural south St. Louis County landed Orville Roy at the Chrysler assembly plant in Fenton.
Recently discharged from the Marine Corps, Roy decided to fill out an application. A job offer came two days later and, with it, a legacy was born.
Eventually, three of Orville Roy’s sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson, Michael Roy Jr., would follow him through the Fenton plant gates.
"It’s been our living, our livelihood," said Michael Roy Sr., 48, Orville’s son.
No more.
On July 10, Michael Roy Jr. and 600 other Chrysler workers will punch their time cards and go down in history as the final shift at a location that has turned out the automaker’s products for a half-century.
"There’s no middle class anymore," said Michael Roy Sr., forced to retire from Chrysler in December due to medical problems. "The middle class is gone."
That may be an overstatement from a former worker angered and betrayed by what he sees as the failure of the United Auto Workers and Chrysler to protect local production jobs now outsourced to Mexico and Canada.
But it still rings true for families, like the Roys, who have come to view assembly line positions at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler as a birthright.
Multigeneration families employed by and loyal to a single car manufacturer have long been "part and parcel of the automobile business," said Michael Smith, director of the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University and an expert on the labor movement. "That’s why the auto crisis is so devastating."
Matthew Diemer, an assistant professor of counseling at Michigan State University, said it may be premature to declare the "death" of a tradition of children following parents and grandparents into blue-collar manufacturing jobs.
"But maybe," he allows, "what we’re seeing is the death knell."
COMPLICATED OPTIONS
The bell tolled for the Roy family on April 30, the day Chrysler announced it was laying off what remained of Fenton’s Dodge Ram pickup truck work force. (The company halted minivan production at the Fenton location last year.)
After work that afternoon, 24-year-old Michael Roy Jr. and his mother, Cheryl Roy, repaired to a local tavern to consider a series of complicated options.
In mid-May, Cheryl Roy, made her up her mind. An autoworker for 14 years, she rejected a possible transfer to a Chrysler facility in either Illinois or Michigan and took a company buyout.
Cheryl is collecting severance benefits, searching for a job and staying at the family home in Arnold to care for her husband, Michael Sr., who retired following diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Also looking for work, Michael Roy Jr. wonders what the future holds for a young man who aspired to retrace the footsteps of his grandfather and father.
"I’m good with my hands," he said. "And if you’re good with your hands, what can you do now?"
The official answer: Move from the production of goods and services dependent on nonrenewable resources to the production of environmentally sustainable commodities. Manufacturing the blades used in power-generating wind turbines is a commonly cited example.
State and national leaders across the nation, including Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, contend that so-called "green jobs" represent the next wave of American manufacturing.
Michael Jr. knows that getting a foothold in the clean energy work force means going back to school. A few credits shy of an associate’s degree, he walked away from his education to accept an offer of a part-time Chrysler job that he saw as a stepping stone to full-time employment personal loans.
Strapped by declining income as he helps tend to his father, Michael cannot afford, in terms of either time or money, to return to his studies at Jefferson Community College.
Smith agrees that Michael’s best hope rests in furthering his education,
A former autoworker himself, Smith laments that the days when a union membership card served as a portal to a middle class lifestyle are slowly disappearing.
"The jobs that dad and grandpa had, that didn’t require anything more than a high school education, are no longer around," Smith said. "Even auto working is not just about putting on hubcaps anymore. It’s a lot more sophisticated."
ITS OWN REWARD
That was not the case when Orville Roy, now 80, began working his way through various administrative departments, including payroll, in 1968.
"In the old days, if you knew somebody and you wanted to get hired, all you had to do was ask for a recommendation," he said.
All the better if that acquaintance happened to be a blood relative.
Putting aside their disappointment that jobs once performed in Fenton are now held by workers in Canada and Mexico, Michael Sr. and Cheryl Roy acknowledge their family of six has done all right by the nation’s No. 3 domestic automaker.
"We have four kids that wanted to play sports and take dance classes and do all sorts of things," said Cheryl. "Somebody had to pay for it."
Until Cheryl went to work in the pickup plant in 1995, that somebody was her husband, who had started as a "floater" in the chassis department 11 years before.
"I worked on the line, and that was punishment," said Michael Sr.
"I’ve shoved in engines, I’ve thrown tires and I’ve thrown bumpers," said Michael Sr., lapsing into autoworker jargon to describe the tasks he performed at Fenton. The "punishment" of the line, though, had its own reward: By the time Michael Sr. retired late last year, he was earning $29.95 an hour, plus the heralded UAW benefit package.
There was also the intangible benefit, Michael Jr. noted, of spotting a Dodge Ram on the road and thinking, "I made that truck."
TUG OF TRADITION
Michael Jr. never matched his father’s salary.
Nor, because his tenure paralleled Chrysler’s shrinking market share, was Michael Jr. ever offered a full-time position at the plant.
Michael Jr. can lay claim, however, to a dubious distinction: He worked both the last day and night shift to produce a minivan at the South Plant and, later, was assigned to the last North Plant night shift to build a pickup.
Michael Jr. was circumspect last week as he reflected on the irony of a callback has placed him on a shift that will soon assemble the final Chrysler product ever built in Fenton.
"It’s frustrating," Michael Jr. said. "But (unlike his dad and grandfather) I haven’t put my whole life into it."
Resolved that the time has come for him to move forward, the son of Michael Roy Sr. and grandson of Orville Roy nonetheless feels the tug of the tradition that began on a long ago leisurely drive that wound up, improbably, at a car factory.
"I was kind of hoping," Michael Jr. said wistfully, "that my grandkids would work there."
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