Taking In Each Other's Laundry

The Fremont automobile plant will close soon, idling more Californians and ending all vehicular production in our fair state.

Good riddance.

I say this not to mock the five thousand people who will lose their jobs. Every day my Monologues are filled with sarcastic rants about an America losing its way, an America not worth caring about, but at the end of the day I am human; I empathize with many. But come on, we all saw the manufacturing writing on the wall -- California is not the place to be building stuff...it's the place to be consuming stuff; that's our role in our modern globalized world.

What girds my loins about this plant closing can be summarized in this picket line photo:



"Help Save Local Economy." Local jobs. Yep. Thousands of local jobs. Uh-huh. Local...until you understand that 48% of these NUMMI workers commute in from the Central Valley. They live in Tracy, live in Ceres, or live in Stockton because they can't afford to live near their work. They drive 140 miles a day and make the claim that they're losing local jobs.

Over two thousand workers grinding out commutes over the Altamont, grinding past all that "green" wind generation, where a fifth of Altamont's total wind energy output is consumed by just this one factory and this factory's commuters. Plant energy, by the way, that's been subsidized for two decades by the rest of California's ratepayers as a carrot to keep the plant operating in Fremont.

So what we have here are automobile workers working to manufacture vehicles who themselves buy their own manufactured vehicles to commute to the factory to manufacture more vehicles. This reminds me of Browne's taking in each other's laundry, the end game of our service economy where hot dog vendors sell hot dogs in one city and vacation in an adjacent city to buy hot dogs on their days off.

"Without NUMMI, how can we afford to pay our mortgage, our car payments, our health insurance?" asks Marcela Alvarez, a factory worker likely to get put out of work.

Well, Marcela -- how about working the returns counter at the Ross Dress for Less, the satellite anchor for the new strip retail power center that will snatch up that valuable Fremont property? Look to the old GM plant in Van Nuys to see where your job is going, Marcela -- razed in 1998 to build a Home Depot anchored strip mall and movie theater. Or the old Ford plant in Pico Rivera, today housing a Home Depot strip mall of its own. Perhaps, Marcela, you could sell movie tickets and popcorn to Union City movie attendants on their days off; all those fantastic new retail service jobs will most certainly pay your mortgage and your own private health insurance premiums.