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.

Today, the man who as a boy dreamed of being a football star and who, at 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds, makes a compact Chevy Cobalt drop an inch when he plops into the front seat, is comfortable. As a GM electrical repairman, he makes $29.81 an hour. He eats at a dining room table covered with a white tablecloth, surrounded by rich fabric window dressings and the delicate angel figurines favored by his wife of 32 years. His three children went to college.

"I thank God for GM," he says.

Following in Dad's footsteps

As a boy, Faust sat in his kitchen and watched his father, Roosevelt Faust, make his own lunch, pack it into his black lunchbox and walk out the door with a thermos of coffee in hand. He always aimed to be 30 minutes early for work. For three decades, the elder Faust worked for the auto industry, first in foundries, then as a repairman.

"I wanted to pattern myself after him," Faust says.

Roosevelt had sinewy muscles toned by lifting pieces of iron instead of fancy barbells. He never wore blue jeans and had a penchant for suspenders, whether over a flannel work shirt or white dress shirt, his old photos show.

Along with millions of other African Americans who migrated to Detroit from the South in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, Roosevelt Faust came looking for higher-paying work in Northern factories. He'd been working at a pecan factory in Memphis before he headed to Detroit in 1942, recalls his daughter, Mary Faust Hammons, 77.

Roosevelt, wife Mable and daughter Mary stayed with relatives in the projects in Detroit. He worked odd jobs as a day laborer, picking up scrap metal and paper for resale, before starting at a foundry owned by Chrysler.

A paycheck stub, yellowed by time, shows that he took home $85.37 for a week of work ending Nov. 11, 1956.

Roosevelt eventually got on with the Dodge Main Assembly Plant, repairing cars at the end of the assembly line. That was where he would work for the rest of his life.

Roosevelt had his first stroke at work and was taken out on a stretcher. He returned to work for about a year and had a second stroke after feeling poorly and walking into a hospital, his son says. He died a few days later in 1976 at age 68.

Educated to the third grade, the elder Faust would eventually buy a two-story home on a corner lot on a Detroit street overrun with children. His neighbors included a judge and a doctor. He built his own white picket fence.

For years after working a full day at the plant, Faust hired himself out to help people move. At Christmas, he moonlighted by selling cut trees off his corner lot, his son says.

A devout Christian, he read his Bible. His daughter-in-law recently found a union flier inside, with a list of figures scribbled on the back. Bills to pay, she suspects.

After he died, the elder Faust's auto-industry pension helped sustain Mable, who worked as a teacher's aide and custodian, for nearly three decades until her death.

"She lived a good life after he was gone," says the younger Faust.

Maurice Faust and his two sisters reaped the benefits of their parents' work.

For him, there was a sharkskin suit for his elementary school graduation. For his sisters, there was college. Mary would later serve on the Detroit Board of Education. Veronica Faust's secretarial skills would take her to California.

"I never had to go around with hand-me-down clothes or run-down shoes," Maurice says.

There were also lessons about the value of money. As a preteen, he worked a paper route, making $25 a week, $12 of which he had to save, $7 of which he had to give to his father. The rest he could spend. It took two months, but he bought $10 Converse All Star canvas shoes.

"Back in my day, they were the highest-price gym shoe," he says.

Maurice now works as an electrical repairman. Part of his plant is on the same land formerly occupied by his father's Dodge Main plant, which was torn down.

A lesson at 19

Faust almost missed his autoworker lifestyle.

In 1975, his father — who didn't think his son was ready for the rigors of a factory job — finally recommended him for a job to a supervisor.

Faust, then 19, got the call. But he was headed off for a weekend with his community choir, so he asked the man if he could "call back on Tuesday."

He never called back.

"I lost the confidence of my dad," Faust says. "I learned then, 'You don't ask someone offering you a job to call you back later.' "

Faust got his second chance two years later.

It came to him in June 1977, a year after his father's death, at the site of an A&P grocery store at the corner of 8 Mile Road and Lahser Road on the Detroit border.

As he was going home from his job prepping cars at a Volkswagen dealership, Faust ran into a family friend, Clyde Jones Jr., a supervisor at GM. "He asked, 'Do you want to work for GM?' " Faust recalls. "I'll never forget it."

The work was hard. Faust pushed drills through metal, lifted 75-pound doors without a hoist and welded cars. More than once, he came home with singed hair. Workers took lead tests twice a year, just in case.

Like many, Faust expected to work the line for a few years, then go to college. "Thirty years later, we're all still there," he says.

Like his father, Faust usually worked two jobs: one at GM and a second at the auto dealership, or as a court officer at a district court. When their three sons were bigger, wife Annie, 54, also worked two jobs, in retail and at clerical jobs.

Again, a Faust family enjoyed the benefits of an auto-industry paycheck.

There were annual family vacations to Toronto, a four-hour drive away. There were treats: for Annie, a brown beaver coat two decades ago that cost $1,900. For the Faust couple: a 16-day trip to Hawaii. For the boys: whatever their parents thought would help them succeed.

When the eldest son, Wilson, announced in eighth grade that he wanted to be a doctor, he got a chemistry set. All three children went to college. Before that, they all went to private high school.

"I gave my sons all that I was supposed to," Faust says.

Third generation

Given the uncertainty of what's to come, and the weakness of GM and the economy, Faust decided not to buy or lease a car for a year.

The nation's real estate crash worries him, too. Just recently, a foreclosed home similar to his across the street sold for $54,000. The Fausts paid $204,000 for their home in 2001.

"It's a bad feeling," Faust says.

The couple have a tidy nest egg saved for retirement. Annie also has a business: making and selling fabric-wrapped boxes and decorating homes for the holidays. She keeps copies of Neiman Marcus ads in which models carry her packages.

Faust's eldest, Wilson, 35, now works as an engineer for GM. He just built a home near Flint, north of Detroit.

Faust doesn't fret about what Wilson would do should layoffs engulf him, too.

"He can take his skills to another state," Faust says. "I always told my sons I didn't mind them working in the auto industry, but I didn't want them on the line. We production workers, if we get laid off, we've got nowhere to go."