It's fascinating to take something apart. As a college student, I once decided to disassemble a mechanical typewriter. For those of you born after 1980, a "typewriter" was a sort of precursor to the computer, but with complicated springs and gears and levers instead of electronics.
"Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant" by Paul Clemens has for me something of the same fascination. I have a quibble with the title -- for most of the narrative the Budd Company plant isn't closing, it is closed and, in fact, being taken apart. The book, however, isn't so much the chronicle of the disassembly of multiple assembly lines of gigantic machines -- though there's plenty of that -- as the chronicle of the disassembly of an economic system and way of life, as reflected in the dismantling of the plant. It could easily have taken the subtitle, "This Is What Deindustrialization Looks Like."
Clemens grew up in Detroit and there's no doubt how he feels about what's happening there -- he prefaces the book with a quote from Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year." Yet his writing is not so much outraged as bemused. As he puts it in the prologue, he was having trouble finding a shape to this story. He'd spent a year researching it before he talked to Jon Clark, the editor of a trade magazine called "Plant Closing News," who said, "It makes you wonder what went wrong, that a[n auto parts] plant could sit between two [Chrysler] manufacturing plants ... they ... pick up the equipment and take it ... three thousand miles, and ... make the same parts and ship 'em back cheaper. ... That oughta be a story."
Clemens makes it a story. The machines in the plant are generally too large and heavy -- tens of feet tall and hundreds of tons in weight -- to be shipped whole. Clemens uses the disassembly and shipping of the machinery abroad as a central metaphor. He starts by situating the plant in the sea of functioning and abandoned plants that you can see from Detroit's I-94 freeway, briefly describing the numerous vacant lots where buildings have been demolished. He tells the history of the plant, which was active for just under a hundred years and was most notable for producing parts for the Ford Thunderbird sports car in the 1950s. While he talks to the union rep at the plant's UAW local before it closes, he spends most of his time with the non-union workers who are brought in to take the plant apart. There's no shortage of this kind of work, since, according to Clark, about 100 American factories are closing every month.
Some of the workers taking the Budd plant apart are immigrants and itinerant workers who move from one closed factory to the next. Others are the children of Detroit factory workers who couldn't get a job on an assembly line and found that these disassembly jobs are the best way to make a living in a Rust Belt economy. As Clemens puts it, "The new UAW contract ... would mark a new manufacturing moment: you could now make more money taking an auto plant apart than you could, as a new hire, working in one."
As a writer, Clemens becomes part of his story: "What sent me back to Budd, again and again, was a wish to live deliberately. This sounds absurd -- a cabin in Concord Budd was not. But ... a Detroit auto plant would be my Walden Pond. ... There was nothing to focus on except for what was in front of me, which was the city of my birth in microcosm: a lot of space, inhabited by a scattering of people who were, in a sense, the last of their kind." He describes the long process as the unheated plant, occupying 1.8 million square feet -- 41 acres of floor space -- empties out over the course of a harsh winter, as enormous rooms full of giant machines become open interior space, leaving behind vast vistas with huge, gaping maintenance pits full of ice.
In the final chapter, Clemens flies down to Mexico to see what the German company that owns the plant has done with the Budd main assembly line. The move of that one line took 90 truck trips between Detroit and Aguascalientes. Clemens watches a van picking up the first shift workers at the gate and realizes that "Henry Ford's five-dollar day, designed to allow line workers to purchase the cars they helped make, hadn't yet dawned in Mexico." In fact, he finds, workers in the plant make on the order of $300 a month, far less than the minimum wage in the United States. As Clemens puts it, "There were billions [of potential manufacturing employees] around the globe ... and Detroit hadn't submitted the low bid."
After I finished the book, I remembered what happened when I took my typewriter apart. I never did get it put back together. It's a lot easier to take something apart than to restore it the way it was.