In 1976 he followed the top wage to Gel, based in Livonia, Mich. The company promised $6.50 an hour plus a retirement plan.
Gel's owner, a mathematician and engineer named Jack Cope, specialized in automotive assemblies. Thanks to his obsession with efficiency, Gel was able to bid low and win Ford and GM contracts.
Cope was not much like the other company owners Beeler had known. The first time Beeler met him he thought Cope, with his wavy gray hair, raspy voice, and calloused hands, was the night janitor. He seemed like just another "dirt hound," as Beeler puts it. Sometimes Cope would tinker with the screw machines all night, then change into coat and tie the next morning to play chairman.
Like Beeler, Cope was much more comfortable around machines than around people. The difference was that Cope was supposed to be running the place. He brought in executive after executive to run the company for him, but few of them lasted as long as a year.
It wouldn't have surprised Beeler to hear that in one year, by Cope's estimate, management changes cost the company some $500,000 in profits over several years, when sales were between $3 million and $7 million per year. Not that Cope tried to hide the problem. At a company Christmas party, he stood up, raised his glass high, and offered a toast. "I apologize for all the changes in management we've had this past year," he declared.
With no consistent leadership, departments didn't work together. Need a broom? Steal it from the department next door. Not in the mood to come to work? That's OK, because we can't agree on an absenteeism policy.
Beeler couldn't blame Cope for feeling overwhelmed. After all, Cope kept coming up with new departments: decorating, plastic molding, powder painting, and so on because, as Beeler well knew, many suppliers made shoddy products.
Beeler came to Gel because of the pay, but he stayed because he felt that Cope respected his work. "The factory is where we make our money," Cope often said. "The brains are on the floor." Cope paid his production people well, giving them 25¢-an-hour raises twice a year and introducing profit sharing in 1979. He even offered employees the option of buying stock at $7 a share. Beeler and his wife, Anne, were ready to invest $1,500, the maximum amount. Then Cope suddenly withdrew the offer, telling Beeler he didn't think the stock was worth it, given the management changes.
Working conditions at Gel were better than Beeler had seen anywhere. There were no oil puddles under the molding machines, and there were plenty of bright halogen lights. Cope was always urging his people to improve; since arriving at Gel, Beeler has collected six diplomas from courses and seminars that Cope has paid for him to attend.
Beeler never doubted that Gel was making money. In the Detroit he knew, in the rich and mighty car business that had fed his father's family and his own, everybody made money. Not that there weren't bad times. The industry's harsh cycles, Beeler thought, fed his father's bleeding ulcers. Anne Beeler could never erase the memory of her brother, who worked for a giant brake supplier, coming home without a job one afternoon in 1958. A few years later, though, Detroit was its old roaring self. Of course it was. Whatever ailed the industry was nothing that couldn't be cured by next year's model.
That's how 1980 looked to Beeler at first. It was just another slowdown, nothing lingering except for maybe a few bad memories.
He couldn't see that the world that had spawned Gel just four years earlier was disappearing fast. In 1976, the year Gel was founded, about 80% of all cars sold in the United States were American made. Detroit's factories ran near capacity. Beeler and his co-workers sometimes grumbled about too much overtime. Many of the imports still had such European names as Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and Fiat. A Japanese company, Honda, housed a few executives in mobile homes just north of Columbus, Ohio.
By 1979 Gel was posting sales of $2.3 million with healthy aftertax profits of about 5%. That was the same year that gas prices rose dramatically. One year later the Japanese manufacturers, with their small, fuel-efficient cars, had blown right by Detroit in fifth gear.
It happened very fast. In 1979 Beeler asked Cope to buy another Brown & Sharpe screw machine. Even working 60 hours a week, he complained, I can't keep up with the jobs we're getting. By the time the machine arrived, in early 1980, Cope had cut Beeler's hours from 58 to 40 a week. "We just don't have the work," he told Beeler.
Throughout 1980, Beeler watched his world unravel on the nightly news. General Motors posted its first annual loss since 1921 -- $763 million. Ford lost about $1 billion. "I wanted to point a finger at somebody, but I didn't know where to point it," he says. "To me, an American car was a cherished thing."
He cherished his job, too, but there was barely enough work at Gel for two machinists, never mind the usual six. What's more, he felt trapped. Beeler called up a job shop that specialized in appliance parts. We can give you 40 hours a week, the man said, for a month, maybe two. And after that? Look, George, the man said, you know the situation. Everybody's getting hammered around here.
There was no escaping it at home. Four of his wife's brothers worked for an automotive supplier. Ray was laid off. Mike took early retirement. Their nephew, Mark, was among the friends and relatives who moved to Texas, buoyed by promises of a lucrative building boom -- much as Beeler's own forebears had been lured from eastern Kentucky by Detroit's high-paying auto factories. "You'd hear about people leaving Detroit all the time," Beeler recalls. "And you'd wonder, Are they ever coming back?" His teenaged son, John, decided to stay in high school an extra year to take more courses and "wait out the bad times."
