'Punching Out,' by Paul Clemens: review

Punching Out

One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

By Paul Clemens

(Doubleday; 271 pages; $25.95)

Detroit means cars. And lately it appears that Detroit - that is, the U.S. auto industry - may be rising from the dead, with new models, new shareholders and new profits for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

But Detroit is also a real and rusting city, where all is not well. Along with America's cars, it built America's prosperous working class. It was Detroit auto workers who showed that a factory job could support a family with a nice house and, of course, a car or two or three. And this working class is vanishing.

Paul Clemens, a Detroit native, doesn't like it when outsiders come to take haunting photographs of his city's spectacular ruins and abandoned neighborhoods. He understands their fascination, though, and he has tried to dig a little deeper into the deindustrialization of the American urban landscape and the American working class.

Clemens' story, "Punching Out," is set in one of Detroit's many magnificent hulks: the Budd Co.'s stamping plant, built in 1919. For decades, its enormous presses punched out (hence his double-entendre title) steel body panels, wheels and other parts for the Big Three automakers - most famously, for the original Ford Thunderbird.

With increasing automation, its workforce, once nearly 10,000, steadily dwindled until its new German owners no longer saw any profit in employing Detroiters. They closed the plant in 2006, and Clemens observes what followed.

He develops a perverse affection for the crumbling factory. But his real subject is the changing cast of workers who extract everything of value from the plant, especially the stamping machines, which weigh hundreds of tons. Some of them are sold at auction and then slowly dismantled for transport to their new owners in Brazil and Mexico. The rest are cut up for scrap.

We get a glimpse of the old-line autoworkers who lost their jobs, but they are gone from the scene during the year Clemens spends at the closed plant. Instead, he observes the riggers, scrap crews and truckers who dismantle the plant's intestines piece by piece.

These hard-drinking, heavy-smoking men (we see few women here) are the rugged individualists who are thriving, if one can call it that, in the new Detroit. After the United Auto Workers union staved off extinction by agreeing to low wages for new autoworkers, "you could now make more money taking an auto plant apart than you could, as a new hire, working in one."

These postindustrial workers bear no resemblance to the human automatons of Henry Ford's assembly lines, the regimented world memorably portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times." This is a small and disorganized working class, improvising in the grease and the cold.

Unlike the UAW retirees from the closed plant, many of these men hate labor unions, which, to them, just mean rules that interfere with getting the job done. They are confident that this job will be followed by another one, since theirs is Detroit's most thriving business. But they also know that job security, health benefits and pensions are not in their future.

Clemens hangs out, watches and listens. He slowly builds up a portrait of "the American working class, mopping up after itself." He comes to admire, for example, the skill and work ethic of a crew of toothless Arkansas drifters, throwbacks to "a time when guys good with their hands didn't have to worry about being good at much else, up to and including speaking."

To Clemens, these men were "something out of Faulkner." Here, and throughout the book, Clemens acknowledges his distance from his subjects, even after months alongside them. He remains the man of words, jotting down the turns of phrase he hears, or tossing off and then making fun of his own similes. He imagines himself as a Henry David Thoreau of the Rust Belt: "a Detroit auto plant would be my Walden Pond."

Clemens is no Michael Moore. He mulls the paradoxes and, occasionally, the injustice of Detroit's wrenching transformation, but there is no outrage here, and there are no villains. Nor does he give a thought to the environmental contamination of a brownfield site like the Budd plant. (Of course, nobody is likely to reuse the land anytime soon.) His unhurried, digressive style won't grab you, but it might grow on you.

The outcome of the story is pretty clear all along, so there's no real drama here - and he doesn't try to create any. Still, there are little adventures in the daily work. Dismantling and moving a hundred-ton press is a job that demands a peculiar combination of strength, delicacy and patience. Things never go as planned, especially in a dark, leaky, unheated building.

Out of the painstaking job of dismantling industrial America, a story emerges. Clemens closes the book on one venerable factory, but leaves us wondering about the future of American work.

Brian Ladd is the author of "Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age." E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page HG - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle