Autoworkers cling to middle class

— -- As United Auto Workers union members endure a drawn-out contract-negotiation process, workers say they are fighting for more than just wages and health care benefits. They say they're fighting to protect their membership in the middle class.

Just two weeks after his 18th birthday, Randy Horter started his first factory job, helping make clutches and air conditioning systems at an auto parts plant.

Since then, the 49-year-old Chrysler line worker has cobbled together a career working at various manufacturing plants, and made a nice, middle-class life with his wife, Candace, who works at the same Chrysler plant in Belvidere, Ill. The couple earn about $75,000 a year, unless one or the other is laid off. They own two used cars and their home. Between them, they raised five children, now grown, and were hoping to start preparing for retirement.

Horter's goals as a young man, he says, were simple: "To be a man, and raise a family."

"I come from a hardworking family — my parents worked, both my grandparents worked," Horter says. When he went into the job market in the 1970s, "There were jobs where you can work for 30 years and retire and get a pension. This is a thing of the past now. Those kinds of jobs don't exist for my children. I have a grandson — I can't imagine what having a job and making a living will mean for him."

For the most part, the contracts hammered out at GM and Chrysler help maintain that standard of living. There are no base pay increases, but the automakers are doling out $3,000 signing bonuses and a couple of other annual bonuses instead. Health care plans are changing, reducing coverage, restricting doctor's office visits and increasing co-pays, and retiree health care will be funded from an independent trust set up by the automakers.