The Courier-Journal (Louisville), May 18, 2009, Monday

Copyright 2009 The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)
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The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky)

May 18, 2009, Monday

HEADLINE: Ford's workers making bold moves South

BODY:
ll winter I've been working, been making cars in Detroit.

But tomorrow morning, I will be checking out.

I am leaving Detroit.

I am heading South.

-- Bluegrass singer Danny Paisley & The Southern Grass, 2008

When Ford Motor Co. offered autoworkers in Detroit the opportunity to transfer to its truck plant in Kentucky, Joe DeBono said he leapt at the chance.

His favorite haunt in suburban Detroit, a sports bar owned by his sister, was nearly empty on most nights. He'd seen neighbors in his downriver suburb of Redford let homes slide into foreclosure.

Friends, co-workers and family were losing jobs.

"It hit everybody. People you would never see hurting were scrimping to get by," said DeBono, 41. "People don't have the money to spend, or they are too depressed to spend, or too scared to do anything. "

So in January, DeBono traded duties touching up paint jobs at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., for a new job loading stamped sheet metal at the Kentucky Truck Plant on Chamberlain Lane.

He's among two dozen United Auto Workers who recently came south to work for Ford in Louisville -- part of the leading edge of what Deborah Dwork, a history professor specializing in migration at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., calls a wave of economic refugees.
Of the 84 counties in Michigan, 60 are losing population as economically distressed residents move, she said.

States like Kentucky, Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma, where unemployment still ranks lower than Ohio, Michigan and other industrialized states, will become new homes for "potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans," Dwork said.

"There is a national movement afoot," she said. "We are only beginning to see it now."

Though many of the Ford migrants had never been to Kentucky, they said that the move seemed like a good bet, with plants that seem well positioned within the company's future plans.

This year, the Kentucky Truck Plant took over production of the Expedition and Lincoln Navigator sport-utility ve-hicles from Michigan Assembly, broadening a portfolio that already included Ford's F-Series Super Duty pickups.

And while the Louisville Assembly Plant continues to make the less-favored Explorer SUVs, it's been promised a makeover by 2011 to produce small cars.

The transplant policy

The Michigan transplants were part of 400 new arrivals in January who boosted Kentucky
Truck's union work force to 3,800.

Most of those new workers transferred from the Louisville Assembly Plant across town, where the work force has dwindled to 1,466 people who labor one week on, one week off, on just one shift, to make the Ford Explorer.

The hundreds who came from outside the state took advantage of so-called "transfer rights."

Many industrial unions have provisions that require employers to relocate employees to plants where more work is available, said Richard W. Hurd, professor of labor at Cornell University in New York, but the UAW has stronger transfer rights than most unions.

Transfers are based on a worker's seniority with the company, regardless of their location.
The transplanted Michigan workers' old plant in Wayne, just outside of Detroit, is undergoing a $550 million con-version of its own, from building jumbo SUVs to gas and hybrid versions of the small Focus cars.

Still, the workers who have relocated here said they believe there's a brighter future outside Michigan.

Michigan's unemployment in April reached 12.6 percent, the highest in the United States.
And with 13 times more auto jobs than any other state, Michigan's stagger- ing unemployment rate is uniquely tied to the still uncertain auto industry, which has shed 500,000 jobs in recent years, said Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

"This is our Katrina," she recently told National Public Radio. "It has been death here by 500,000 cuts."

After 30 years with Ford, Clarence Paylor, 50, said he came to Louisville after a disturbing series of incidents near his home on Detroit's working-class west side.

Last fall, thieves stripped aluminum siding from the garage outside his small, wood-frame ranch home.

That was one of "the things I never saw before," Paylor said of the recession's ravages on his neighborhood. "De-troit looks dead. The city looks deflated because everybody is moving out."
Well-calculated risk

Transplant workers like DeBono and Paylor note that in Louisville, unlike Michigan, "Help Wanted" signs can still be found, albeit for low-wage retail and restaurant jobs.

A declining manufacturing industry has definitely hurt Louisville. It has lost 21,800 such jobs since 2000, accord-ing to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the area's economy is more diversified than southeastern Michigan, said Robert Dye, a senior economist who follows the region from PNC Bank headquarters in Pittsburgh.

Louisville's economy is bolstered by the UPS hub; the healthcare industry, including Humana; and Yum! Brands, to name a few, Dye said.

It helps, too, he said, that Ford has specific plans for both of its plants here -- they "seem to be relatively stable."

Many of the transplant workers spoke of hopes that federal stimulus funding will jumpstart the long-suffering housing and construction industry, a rebound they predict will boost demand for Super Duty pickups.

"If our president gets the economy going at all, they are going to need trucks," said Amy Reese, 37, a single Ford worker who left her New Boston, Mich., home for a new start here.

"This product is not going anywhere," she added. "Ford does not build this truck anywhere else."

The big adjustment

Each Ford plant has its own culture, said Cash, who relocated from a Ford plant in Ohio a decade ago.

"We want them to be comfortable here," he said. "We are doing our best to help them feel at home."

For now, DeBono said he commutes home six hours each way to Redford on weekends, where his stepdaughter is completing her senior year of high school. He doesn't expect to be able to sell his house there any time soon, but DeBono said that he and his wife hope to rent it and buy in Louisville by fall.

With 14 years at Ford, DeBono said he's not looking back.

The medical benefits available from Ford are worth relocation in expectation of more job security, he said, noting that his wife, Kathie DeBono, 43, suffers from multiple sclerosis.

When he is not working the graveyard shift, DeBono retreats to an apartment near the plant off Westport Road.

"I miss having a house and a yard and dogs. I am trying not to spend money," he said. "Next year, hopefully, life will be kind of back to normal."

Reporter Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669.

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