Automotive industry let one family make a life

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. -- Maurice Faust, a lifelong General Motors factory worker, has had every utility in his house shut off at one time or another.

After one three-year layoff in the 1980s, the heat was off for a week because Faust couldn't pay. He, his wife, Annie, and three kids stayed with his mother to escape the Michigan winter.

Another time, money was so tight that Faust ate suppers at work: a vending machine candy bar and "tomato soup" made from ketchup packets, salt, pepper and warm water.

Faust returned to work last month at GM's Hamtramck assembly plant near here after a two-month furlough when GM idled the plant before Christmas to cut costs.

GM has said it will cut 47,000 out of 243,000 jobs this year. The company has received $13.4 billion in federal loans and is seeking an additional $16.6 billion. The government is supposed to decide by March 31 whether GM's restructuring plans will create a viable company.

Despite the turmoil, Faust, two years from retirement, knows that he's made it. His auto industry paycheck — like those received by millions of auto industry workers in the past 60 years — helped lift the high-school-educated Faust into the middle class, as it did his father, who worked on a sharecrop farm as a child in Tennessee, and his son, a GM engineer.

But given the dire straits of U.S. carmakers, Faust fears that his young assembly-worker colleagues will not keep moving up the economic ladder as he and his father did. He counsels young co-workers, who want to drop big bucks on new SUVs, to take care of their money because their autoworker jobs are no longer as secure as they were.

"I got in the industry at the right time," he says. "And it seems as if I'm leaving at the right time."

Faust plans to retire in 2011. As it now stands, he'll get a monthly pension of $3,140 and full medical benefits. The pension part of his payments will go down when Social Security kicks in. To stay longer with GM, he says, could put him in danger of losing benefits if the union contract changes.

Early homeowner

Because of his GM factory job, Faust was able to buy his first home at 21, a three-bedroom brick bungalow in Detroit, for $23,500 with $500 down. Shortly after that, he bought a new Buick LeSabre.

It's still the fanciest car he's ever owned.

"It was like, 'I'm living the American dream here,' " he says.

More than two decades later, Faust sold that home for four times what he paid. The family grew, and the Fausts bought a bigger, four-bedroom, two-story Colonial on a better street in Southfield, formerly a predominantly white Detroit suburb.