Posted on Monday, March 21, 2005 - 11:35 pm:

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"The Central Services Facility (CSF), located at 6425 Huber in Detroit was originally the site of the Chrysler Corporation’s Huber Foundry. Constructed in 1962, the location was used by the automaker to cast engine blocks, axles and other automotive components. The site was turned over to the City of Detroit in 1984. Renovations were begun in 1988 and the site became fully functional as a DWSD facility in December 1989.

"Department functions currently housed at the CSF facility include: three district yards (North, East and Central) from where repairs to the northern, eastern and downtown areas of the City of Detroit are coordinated; the Heavy Repair Yard, which handles all main breaks 12-or more feet below the surface; DWSD’s Meter Operations Division, which tests and calibrates water meters; the Mechanical Maintenance Division, an 80,000 square-feet full-service vehicle-maintenance garage for the Department’s vehicles; and all of DWSD’s trade shops (blacksmith, electrical, and machine shops, etc.). DWSD is only one of two city departments (the other being the Police) to operate a blacksmith’s shop."

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"One of the major concerns of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was the deteriorating working conditions at the point of production. In 1946 some 550,000 autoworkers had produced a little over three million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 autoworkers had produced a little over eight million vehicles. Management credited this much higher productivity per worker to its improved managerial techniques and new machinery. Workers, on the other hand, claimed the higher productivity was primarily a result of their being forced to work harder and faster under increasingly unsafe and unhealthy conditions. The companies called their methods automation; black workers in Detroit called them 'niggermation.'

Niggermation, not automation, was clearly the watchword at Chrysler Corporation's Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant. Clustered alongside four other Chrysler plants - Huber Foundry, Winfield Foundry, Chrysler Forge, and Plymouth - Eldon employed a workforce of over 4000, of which 70% was black. Eldon covered over a million square feet, was surrounded by another half-million square feet of storage and siding areas, and housed 2600 machine tools of 170 types. In a report to the National Labor Relations Board on November 30, 1971, Chrysler Corporation described Eldon as 'engaged primarily in machining metal parts for rear axles of most Chrysler-built automobiles, for which it is the sole source, and assembling the parts into completed axles." Workers considered this key plant the most niggermated factory in Detroit.

Even though Chrysler acknowledged how vital Eldon was to its operations, working conditions at the plant continually deteriorated. These poor conditions reached such proportions that by 1970 harassment, industrial illnesses, injuries and deaths on the job pushed Eldon workers to the breaking point. After James Johnson shot and killed two foremen and a job setter, his attorney, Ken Cockrel, said, 'We'll have to put Chrysler on trial for damages to this man caused by his working conditions," The Johnson jury was taken to Eldon, the 'scene of the crime," to observe for itself the conditions which Judge Philip Colista had called 'abominable" and which UAW Safety Director Lloyd Utter termed inexcusably dangerous" and evidence of 'a complete neglect of stated maintenance procedures." The jury agreed and concluded that James Johnson was not responsible for his actions, That August, during the local contract negotiations, Chrysler admitted to 167 separate safety violations at Eldon; yet a year and a half later, in January of 1971, the Michigan Department of Labor found hundreds of violations of the Michigan safety code still uncorrected, In a separate case brought against Chrysler by Johnson, he was awarded workman's compensation of $75 a week, beginning from the day of his 'breakdown."

"Eldon workers knew that James Johnson was not an isolated case. Serious provocations, injuries, illnesses, and deaths were the realities of their everyday work. On May 26, 1970, less than two months before Johnson fired his M-l carbine, another death had occurred at Eldon. Gary Thompson, a black 22-year-old Vietnam veteran, had been killed when his defective jitney overturned and buried him under five tons of steel. UAW Safety Director Utter investigated the cause of the accident. On November 12, 1970, his written conclusions were sent as an official union inter-office communication to Art Hughes, the Assistant Director of the National Chrysler Department:

'I examined the equipment and found the emergency brake to be broken; as a matter of fact, it was never connected. The shifter lever to the transmission was loose and sloppy. The equipment generally was sadly in need of maintenance, having a lost steering wheel in addition to other general needs. I also visited the repair area and observed other industrial trucks in this area that were sadly in need of repair, noting: no lights, lack of brakes, horns, broken LP gas tank fasteners, loose steering wheels, leaky hydraulic equipment, etc. I was informed that there is supposed to be a regularly scheduled maintenance procedure for this equipment in this plant. I was also informed that operators are instructed to take trucks to the garage and tag them when they are in need of repairs. However, it seems to be the practice of foremen, when equipment is needed, to pull the tags off the equipment in the repair area that badly need corrective maintenance and put them back into service on the floor. Finally, a general observation as we passed to and from the location of the fatal accident: there seemed to be little attempt to maintain proper housekeeping except on the main front aisle. Water and grease were observed all along the way, as we proceeded. Every good safety program has its basic good-housekeeping procedures. Proper steps should be taken immediately to improve conditions within this plant."

Thirteen days before Gary Thompson's death, Eldon had claimed the life of Mamie Williams, a 51-year-old black woman who had worked for Chrysler for over 26 years. Mamie Williams had been ordered by her doctors to stay home because of a dangerous blood pressure condition. Chrysler, however, had sent her a telegram telling her to return to work or Se fired and lose all the benefits she had accumulated in almost three decades of employment. An intimidated Mamie Williams had returned to her job on the first shift in Department 80, One week later, she passed out on the line and died shortly after being taken home. A year before the deaths of Gary Thompson and Mamie Williams, Eldon had taken the life of Rose Logan, a black janitor. Rose Logan had been struck in the plant by an improperly loaded jitney whose driver's vision was blocked. Her doctor told her to stay off her feet, but Chrysler's doctors ordered her back to work, She returned to Eldon from fear of losing her job, developed thrombophlebitis in her leg, and, like Mamie Williams, ended her service at Eldon in a coffin.

Higher production at Eldon bad been achieved not with advanced technology and automated assembly-line procedures, but through the old-fashioned method of speed-up. The single goal of the company was to increase profit by getting more work out of each individual worker. Eldon conditions were typical of conditions in the industry. Even when there were technological changes, usually only one segment of the assembly line was automated, so that the workers on other segments had to labor more strenuously to keep up. Often, the automation eliminated interesting jobs, leaving the more menial and monotonous tasks for people. Many of the 'new" machines were not technological advances at all, but simply updated models of tools introduced as early as the 1920's and 1930's.

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Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - 11:04 pm:

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"In the spring of 1952 in Detroit, I was working at Chevrolet Gear and Axle, the "abandoned factory" of a poem in my first book, On the Edge, and I hated the job more than any I'd had before or have had since, not only because it was so hard, the work so heavy and monotonous that after an hour or two I was sure each night that I would never last the shift, but also because it was dangerous. There in the forge room, where I worked until I was somehow promoted to a less demanding, equally boring job, the stock we handled so gingerly with tongs was still red-hot as we pulled it from the gigantic presses and hung it above us on conveyors that carried our handiwork out of sight. Others had mastered the art of handling the tongs loosely, the way a good tennis player handles his racquet as he approaches the net for a drop volley, applying just enough pressure not to let go and not enough to choke it. Out of fear I squeezed for all I was worth, and all the good advice, the coaching I received from my fellow workers, was of no use.

One night, just after we'd returned to our machines after the twenty-minute break, the guy I was working with -- a squat, broad-shouldered young black man whose energy and good spirits I'd admired for weeks -- tapped me on the shoulder and indicated with a gesture that I should step aside. Together we'd been manning a small punch press; he handed me the stock that came along a conveyor, I inserted it in the machine, had it punched, and then hung it on another conveyor. On this occasion he said nothing, though even if he had I wouldn't have heard him over "the oceanic roar of work." He withdrew a short-handled sledgehammer from inside his shirt and, gripping it with both hands, hammered furiously at the press's die. He then inserted a piece of stock in the machine, tripped the button that brought the press down, and leaped aside before the press could whip the metal out of his hands. The press froze. I went to summon the foreman, Lonnie, while my partner disposed of the hammer. Lonnie took one look at the machine and summoned two men senior to him, or so I assumed since they arrived dressed in business suits. For twenty minutes they searched the area. I finally figured out that they were looking for the instrument with which the press had been sabotaged. Then they separated us and grilled me. There was no question, they assured me, that the press bore the marks of violence. What had "the nigger" done? I answered that I'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, the machine just broke down, almost tore my hands apart. Oh, they looked at each other, I wanted it that way. Well, they could certainly accommodate me. Before the night was over, I was back on the "Big Press," handling those red-hot sections of steel, my hands stiffening and kinking inside the huge gauntlets. Within a few days I was once again dreaming of fire as my hands gnarled even in sleep. I lasted a few more weeks, and when it became obvious that the "Big Press" was mine forever, I quit.

Five years later, while living in Palo Alto, California, on a writing grant from Stanford University, I received an article clipped from a Detroit newspaper and mailed to me. It told of the closing of Chevrolet Gear and Axle; its functions had been moved to a new, highly automated plant near Pontiac. I had already tried at least a dozen times to capture the insane, nightmarish quality of life at Chevy: that epic clanging of steel on steel, the smell of the dead rats we poisoned who crawled off into their secret places and gained a measure of revenge, the freezing winds at our backs as winter moved through the broken windows, the awesome heat in our faces, those dreamlike moments when the lights failed and we stood in darkness and the momentary silence of the stilled machines. In the springlike winter of 1957, sitting in the little poetry room of the Stanford library, which was mine alone each morning, half a country and a universe away from Chevy, I could recall almost without hatred that old sense of utter weariness that descended each night from my neck to my shoulders, and then down my arms to my wrists and hands, and how as the weeks had passed my body had changed, thickening as though the muscles and tendons had permanently swelled, so that I carried what I did with me at all times, even when I lifted a pencil to write my poems. It was not the thickening heaviness of myself I tried to capture in my abandoned-factory poem -- I only managed a glimmer of that -- for I was determined to say something about the importance of the awfulness I had shared in and observed around me, a worthy aim, certainly, but one that stopped me from writing the poetry of what I had most deeply and personally experienced."

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Posted on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - 12:57 am:

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"Like other suppliers, the largest body builders soon clustered in southern Michigan. During the 1920s, the three largest - Fisher Body Company, Briggs Manufacturing Company, and Murray Corporation - were all based in Detroit; the fourth largest, Hayes Body Company, was located in Grand Rapids. Ford was the first large carmaker to build most of its own bodies, prior to World War I. Detroit-based C. R. Wilson Body Company had been the largest body producer on the strength of sales to Ford. However, when Ford began to build its own bodies, Wilson's sales declined, and the company was taken over in the 1920s by Murray. Murray soon ceased body production but continued to supply other automobile components.

"in 1910, Cadillac decided to place a large order for closed bodies with a 2-year-old firm established by two brothers who had worked for Wilson; Fred and Charles Fisher. GM acquired three-fifths of the Fisher Body Company in 1919 and agreed to buy all of its bodies from the company for ten years. The six Fisher brothers - four others had joined Fred and Charles - continued to manage the division even after GM purchased the remaining shares in 1926. The phrase 'Body by Fisher' became a prominent feature of GM's advertising and was affixed to all of the company's cars.

"Fisher acquired the Fleetwood Metal Body Corporation, based in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania, in 1925. Fleetwood, which specialized in customized bodies for higher-priced models, moved to a plant on Fort Street in Detroit during the 1930s in order to supply Cadillac's Clark Avenue assembly plant. The Fleetwood and Clark plants were closed in 1987.

"Briggs continued in business as an independent company even after World War II, because Chrysler bought all of its bodies from Briggs instead of making its own. LeBaron Incorporated, acquired in 1926 to obtain the services of the customized builder's design staff, was retained as a division of Briggs. In recent years, the name has been applied to some of Chrysler's higher-priced models. Briggs workers earned a reputation for untrammeled militancy and were known as 'the Dead-End Kids'.

"Briggs also supplied bodies to another Detroit-based car maker after World War II, Hudson, until it merged with Nash to form American Motors and production was moved to Kenosha. Nash, for its part, back in 1936 had acquired its major body supplier, the Seaman Body Company, located in nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee plant provided stampings for AMC's Kenosha assembly plant until 1988, when both facilities were closed after Chrysler's takeover.

"Fisher Body was the first major supplier to adopt a policy of deliberately locating large new components plants outside the southern Great Lakes region; in fact, prior to World War II, Fisher was the only notable exception to the highly clustered spatial pattern. As bodies were very bulky, Fisher found that hauling them by truck to distant assembly plants was more costly than piling steel, glass, aluminum, rubber, copper, plastics, fabrics, and other materials into rail cars. Just as important, eliminating long-haul shipments across the nation's poorly graded highway system minimized wear-and-tear and potential for damage to the bodies.

"Consequently, Fisher constructed stamping and body plants near GM's final assembly plants, preferably on adjacent sites. By the late 1920s, Fisher was building bodies in every North American city where GM was assembling automobiles. Fisher's plant in Pontiac, built in the late 1920s, was a showcase: the first to be connected by overhead closed bridge to the final assembly plant, thus eliminating the need to haul bodies by truck even short distances, still necessary everywhere else.

"Fisher Body developed its own set of suppliers of parts and raw materials. To assure supplies of glass, in 1920 Fisher bought a controlling interest in the National Plate Glass Company , which in turn had acquired three large and well-known glass factories dating from approximately 1900, including Columbia Plate Glass Company in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, Federal Plate Glass Company in Ottowa, Illinois, and Saginaw Plate Glass Company in Saginaw.

"Fisher controlled 25,000 hectares of timberlands in northern Michigan and 65,000 in the southern states of Louisiana and Arkansas, plus an additional amount in the Pacific Northwest, and operated woodworking plants in Memphis, Tennessee, and Seattle, Washington, and sawmills in Louisiana. Fisher also operated plants for stampings in Cleveland and Grand Rapids , and trim in Ionia, Michigan. Ternstedt Manufacturing Company, which made body parts, such as window cranks, at a plant in Detroit, was acquired by Fisher. A second Ternstedt plant opened in Trenton, New Jersey, during the 1930s to make body hardware."

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Posted on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - 5:26 pm:

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"The Studebaker Corporation owns and operates one of the largest and most completely equipped plants in the automobile industry. It employs in the neighborhood of 10,000 men and the production capacity of the Plants is 50,000 automobiles a year. This is one of the few Companies which builds practically every part that goes into the car."

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Posted on Thursday, March 24, 2005 - 2:17 am:

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Hemmings Motor News

A very common misconception is that American Motors Corp. was a Kenosha-based company. Not true. Never was. Although AMC predecessor Nash-Kelvinator did indeed call Kenosha its hometown at one time, by the late 1930s Nash had moved its headquarters into the handsome Kelvinator building on Plymouth Road on the edge of Detroit, in part justifying its hyphenated, pre-AMC corporate identity. When Nash-Kelvinator morphed into American Motors in 1954, the new company continued to call Detroit its home, although the bulk of automotive manufacturing operations remained in Kenosha, where AMC built Nashes and Hudsons through 1957, Ramblers until 1969, and AMCs clear through the 1987 Eagle. (Before my fellow AMC fans reach for their pens to correct me here, I should note that, technically speaking, the 1988 Eagle was not an AMC). Naturally enough, American Motors' main engineering activities took place in Detroit. But the company also maintained an engineering department out at the plant in Wisconsin. And that's where our subject car, a one-of-a-kind 1967 Rambler Rebel, built with straight-line performance fully in mind, was created.

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Posted on Thursday, March 24, 2005 - 9:21 pm:

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Jjaba
As for the parking lot, use a siren and The Club to deter thieves.

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Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 2:24 am:

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Old Car Factories

Sven1977
Member
Username: Sven1977

Post Number: 7

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