The chicken stacked on the steam table at the Family Market is not just any old chicken. “It’s broasted chicken,” said a proud Roger Matheny, the grocery’s owner. “Can’t get that everywhere, you know.”
Nor can you find a more dependable economic indicator of what’s going on in a city where there is a GM employee for each man, woman, child, dog, cat and possibly hamster. Though 6,000 people live here, some 8,000 drive to work here day in, day out for General Motors Corp. But the 3,900 workers who make the GMC Jimmy, Chevrolet Blazer and Oldsmobile Bravada sport-utilities at the plant have been idled for a week, victims of GM’s rippling labor dispute with the United Auto Workers union–two years after they were furloughed because of another surgical strike by the UAW.
Roger Matheny, a lifelong resident, small businessman and mayor of this southwestern Ohio city, said his broasted chicken, the big lunch-time draw, isn’t moving because the regular GM traffic is gone. “I figured we were down $700 in sales on a 17-hour day,” Matheny said late last week. That’s off about 15 percent.
Strikes always have that kind of impact, testing the resilience of people and their communities. In neighboring West Carrollton, a factory that supplies seats to trucks and buses was shut down last week. Nearly 100 workers at GM’s air-bag plant in nearby Vandalia were told not to report to work Friday. As the casualties mount, the future is unsettling.
But in blue-collar Moraine, a compact industrial park abutting Dayton, the effects of a strike involving General Motors are intensely and unusually personal. True to the area’s rich, creative legacy of Wilbur and Orville Wright and the lesser-known inventors of the electric ignition, the cash register and the pull-top can, Moraine’s nine square miles are home to nearly 1,000 businesses–most of them tiny, and many of them part of the automotive food chain.
This is not a city of homes but of the small shop, a gritty monument to the marriage of raw materials and human ingenuity. While strikes are nothing new here, the impact when General Motors is involved is always the same. “A shudder is felt through the whole community,” said Michelle Hughes, executive director of the Kettering-Moraine-Oakwood Area Chamber of Commerce.
The shudder reaches parts suppliers, haulers, toolmakers and tinkerers as well as restaurants and merchants. They’re all tied to the fortunes of the three GM facilities in Moraine that produce vehicles, diesel engines and air conditioning equipment.
For some workers at the assembly plant, members of the International Union of Electronics Workers Local 801, the strike is a break from 12-hour shifts and six- and seven-day workweeks. Plant shutdowns and even strikes are part of the region’s working fabric. “We’ve been through this before,” noted Scott Quavic, who runs a fast-food truck parked across from the still-operational GM Delphi plant.
The state of Ohio agreed Thursday to pay unemployment benefits–up to 95 percent of a worker’s take-home pay, for a maximum of 26 weeks–if the strike goes into another week. So no one is pushing the panic button. Not after one week.
Debbie Miller figures she’ll see the impact this week, when the regular crowd at the boisterous Upper Deck Tavern–“just a big GM bar,” as she calls it–starts to tail off. The Upper Deck, wedged next to the assembly plant, is a commercial magnet offering big-screen TV, waitresses who call you “honey” and the ubiquitous neon shrine to Michelob, Miller, Bud and O’Douls.
“We’re going to miss those $50 to $100 lunch orders that come in” from the plant during the morning, said Miller, a co-owner of the tavern. “My father worked for National Cash Register for 25 years, and I know from experience how people cut back when the plants shut down. It’s like a tidal wave. All sorts of people–little factories, grocery stores, my waitresses–will be affected by this.”
The same thing happened in early 1996 when a 17-day strike at two GM brake plants in Dayton shut down virtually all of the automaker’s North American operations.
For now, though, it is not a big concern among the patrons at the Upper Deck. The GM workers talk and eat cheeseburgers out of plastic baskets, pay scant attention to World Cup soccer on ESPN–and no attention to a speech on C-SPAN by House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Uncertainty always generates rumors, and in Moraine they say the strike could keep the truck plant shuttered for as long as into late September. That generates predictable anxiety, exposing the community’s familiar economic vulnerability.
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Heavy reliance on a single industry is nothing new to this region. National Cash Register Co., locally known as “The Cash,” was the biggest corporate pillar for decades. AT&T Corp. took over NCR and in 1995 pulled the plug on its global information unit in Dayton, costing 1,300 employees their jobs. GM, now the area’s largest private employer, has invested more than $1 billion in Moraine alone in the past four years.
“But that could be gone in a heartbeat,” said Matheny, noting GM’s stunning decision to shut down a big plant near Cincinnati in the late 1980s and the general unpredictability of Corporate America’s decision-making. “I think people are scared.”
Wayne Barfels, Moraine’s city manager, said there is always a concern–something short of fear–that GM will dilute its presence and move some of its operations to Mexico or elsewhere if the local operations are not profitable enough. Barfels said Moraine has amassed a $24 million fund–the equivalent of two years of operating budgets–in preparation for big trouble.
“We’re just kind of sitting and watching to see what happens,” Barfels said.
Dave Dysinger, president of the Moraine-based Dayton Tool & Machine Association, is sitting and worrying about GM pulling up stakes. “It’s an ongoing anxiety,” Dysinger said.
Dysinger compared the hardened positions by GM and the UAW to the 1994-95 baseball strike. “While the titans play their game, it absolutely annihilates everyone else,” he said. “It’s like they’re saying, `Forget the fans, forget the vendors.’ “