Drinking and Driving

On the last afternoon before a two-week shutdown at the Claycomo Ford plant, a tailgating party charges up a gravel parking lot at UAW Local 249. The plant sits across four lanes of U.S. Highway 69, but outside the shabby union hall, forty or fifty men and women cluster in small groups around beer coolers and open cars with radios playing, as if they just finished watching a softball game on the union's field nearby.

The mix includes retired auto workers who know it's party day for Ford employees. It includes a shirtless man with a tanned beer belly and a Harley-Davidson bandanna to match his motorcycle. And it includes two men in blue Ford coveralls.

Like homeless men, the two sit on rickety chairs in the shade of a tiny tree within arm's reach of a cooler. They are working. That's why they have radios strapped to their hips with microphones extending to their shoulders. One man's radio belches static and voices. He pushes the button on the microphone and cranes his neck to respond. Then he gets up to drive the few hundred yards back to the plant.

The second man in coveralls reaches for another beer and walks over to the Harley rider, who has just dropped by to brag about his Easy Rider vacation plans. The two dispense high-volume opinions about their employer across the street.

Their jobs are good. The benefits and pay are great. The guy with the Harley makes $23.79 an hour, an amount compounded by the mandatory overtime. Almost everyone has been working "five-eleven," which means they're on the job eleven hours a day for five days straight, plus every third Saturday or so. The workers wilt under those hours. The schedule trashes their personal lives. Marriages don't last.

"You live here," the Harley rider says. "You don't have a social life. You don't have a family life."

But the environment inside the plant is changing. The company is hiring more and more supervisors straight out of engineering school rather than promoting them from the line. The new hires don't ask the line workers when there's a problem. They solve it in their bookish way.

"They don't rely on the people. They rely on the engineers," the man in Ford coveralls says, as if engineers weren't people. The line worker knows how to fix a problem because he has to compensate for it. "He does the same thing 500 fucking times a day. He knows exactly what's wrong."

The Harley rider says he got his ass chewed by one of the engineers after he was caught muscling engines into place instead of moving them solely with the hydraulic equipment. He let a few crack up to prove the point that push-buttons alone won't get the job done.

The conversation turns to eleven Ford workers arrested on drug charges in January.

"What do you expect? You got 6,000 people crowded in there, working their ass off," the Harley rider says. "You get this many people together, sure some are going to do drugs. But if there are big-time drug dealers out here, why are they working at Ford?"

The workers use drugs to cope with the hours, the engineers and, this time of year, the oppressive heat. Only the offices and the break areas are air-conditioned. The rest of the plant is cooled by fans, nearly one per workstation.

"'Attitude adjustment' is what I call it," he says. "I use ephedrine. It's legal."

Having reached repeatedly into the cooler, the man in coveralls is far past the point of making sense. His soapbox outbursts come louder and more often. His "500 fucking times" is becoming a tired refrain. His eyelids droop.

Fortunately, his radio remains silent.

The Claycomo Ford Assembly Plant is so big that workers have to ride bikes and golf carts to get around inside. Staring down one of the long aisles, one can barely make out where the building ends amid the tangle of equipment and the glare of lights. It's like looking at the stars.

The factory has two lines. One spits out the Escape, a mini SUV. The other, as it has for decades, builds F-150 pickup trucks, the pride of Ford. Around 5,800 people work there.

Bonnie dressed like the other women, in T-shirts and jeans or jean shorts. She kept her hair cut about shoulder length. She wasn't gorgeous. She wasn't physically remarkable in any way.

"She just blended in," says a former coworker.

At twenty-something, maybe five feet tall and a hundred pounds, Bonnie's size made her a little unusual in a plant where men have to strong-arm 35-pound bundles of carpet into place. But there were smaller women who took on less physically demanding jobs, such as installing trim work or door speakers.

Bonnie was not the most reliable employee, the coworker says. She failed to show up for work several times during the first ninety days. And she drank at lunch, something that worried coworkers; they feared she would be fired during her three-month probationary period. She wasn't. Rumor had it her father was a big shot in Detroit.