Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

By Paul Clemens

Available from:
Doubleday, New York
www.doubleday.com

Hard cover, 271 pages, $25.95

Reviewed by Larry Edsall
Zoom an e-mail to Larry

The Budd Company is -- oops, was -- America's secret automaker. Founded in Philadelphia but with major foundries and stamping plants in Detroit and Gary, Indiana, as well, Budd was the pioneer in producing all-steel (instead of metal-reinforced wood) automobile bodies and steel (instead of wood) wheels.

However, none of those cars bore Budd badges. Budd wasn't an auto maker but an auto industry supplier. In its heyday, Budd supplied stamped steel body components to Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, Packard, American Motors and others. In the mid-1960s, Budd-stamped steel was part of 28 of the 31 American car lines and was used in 14 of 15 brands of heavy-duty trucks.

For several years, Budd even produced complete body assemblies -- more than 250,000 of them -- for the original Ford Thunderbird, and starting eight days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Budd became part of the arsenal of democracy, producing shells, bazooka rocket bombs and wheels and body components for military vehicles.

When World War II ended, septuagenarian Edward Budd declared, "The wounded and distressed veterans... They are still our men!" and he established a program to hire those wounded warriors, and added medical and psychological staff to support them in his plants.

Edward Budd died soon thereafter, but the company he founded in 1912 continued to grow. By the mid-1970s, Budd had become a billion bucks a year business and was purchased by German steel producer Thyssen AG, which later would merge its operations with yet another German steelmaker, Krupp.

Budd's plant on Detroit's East Side featured an administration building modeled after Independence Hall. The huge steel-stamping facility spanned two-million square feet and employed more than 4,000 people working on 16 lines of tons-heavy equipment, shaping steel to move America.

But then everything -- from government regulation to foreign competition, from local labor costs to free-trade zones, even soaring gasoline prices -- seemed to go wrong for American automakers. Their sneeze was pneumonia for suppliers. In the spring of 2006, ThyssenKrupp Budd announced its Detroit facility would close. Its 16 lines of steel-stamping machines would be sold for scrap or, in most many cases, would be sold to overseas companies who would disassemble them -- just moving the No. 2 line would mean 78 trailer-truck trips from Detroit to the port of Houston -- and ship them to Mexico, South America and Asia.

The massive presses would be reassembled in their new, low-cost labor locations, and would resume the production of automotive body panels, some of them to be shipped right back to American auto assembly plants, including those adjacent to the historic Budd plant on Detroit's East Side.

The irony struck Detroit native Paul Clemens, who found his way into the plant and who chronicles its dismantling in Punching Out.

Clemens writes about what has happened in his hometown, the Motor City, where, "The location of auto plants and car shops were the latitude and longitude lines that oriented my upbringing." But Detroit and the dismantling of the Budd plant is merely a microcosm of what has happened to American manufacturing itself.

A newsletter, Plant Closing News, started keeping track in 2003 and reports the United States has been losing manufacturing plants at the rate of around one thousand a year ever since.

Once upon a time, overtime in factories helped build America's middle class. Now, Clemens notes, only those hired to disassemble those factories are busy enough to keep people working beyond the end of a shift.

Clemens combines a reporter's eye and a hometown heart in a book that focuses on the people hired to do an autopsy on a factory and its equipment, people who may be rough and tough, but who treat the body of the deceased with respect.

"You can't leave this here, to rot in history," one of them tells Clemens. "There's still life left in these machines. It's real important that they keep doing what they do, because a lot of people gave a lot of sweat and equity that has gone into these machines. You can't measure it. You can't measure the lives, you can't measure the lunches, the allowances, that people were able to give their kids."

That's what these machines were about. Not making car parts. Making families.

"My dead relatives [generations who worked in Detroit's auto plants] would be honored that I'm here taking this place apart," the laborer said, adding that he hoped these same machines might now make it possible for others -- albeit in another nation -- to build their families.

His focus wasn't on corporations, but on people.

"They want to get down to business and support their kids and give their kids a better life. And I can appreciate that. That's why we're taking such pains and great care to take this thing apart."

Clemens says Punching Out is a book he didn't want to write. And yet he had to, to tell the story, not of machines but of people, of working-class America, middle-class America, to give it a voice in its own eulogy as its being laid to rest.