End of the line for four generations at GM?

updated 6:37 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2009

LANSING, Mich. - As a 10-year-old, Rollin Green was awestruck when he saw the line of hulking orange-and-silver robotic arms swinging with rhythmic precision during his first visit to an auto plant. But something impressed him even more: His dad worked there.

As a fifth grader, Rollin didn't daydream about becoming a baseball player or an astronaut. He wanted to be an autoworker. Just like his father, Mike.

And grandfather, Richard. And great-grandfather, Kenneth.

And grandmother, Janice. And step-grandmother, Connie. And aunt, Cindy. And great uncles, Bob and Tom, among others.

Over seven decades and four generations, the Greens have together poured nearly 300 years into building Chevys, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadillacs. They've shared holidays, deer hunting blinds, even the same 160-acre patch of land 25 miles away (they jokingly call it 'Green Acres'). They've traveled the same path with almost clockwork precision — making a beeline from high school graduation to a General Motors plant.

Through layoffs and strikes, births and deaths, boom times and bust, the family survived — and thrived — thanks to autos.

Until now.

With GM's future uncertain — the automaker received $13.4 billion in rescue loans and faces a Feb. 17 restructuring plan deadline — Rollin Green may represent the end of the line.

After just six months at the Cadillac plant, Rollin was recently laid off. It wasn't unexpected, but that didn't make it any easier as he drove his Chevy truck out of the lot.

"It's tough," he says, studying a photo of four generations of Greens (and GM workers) as he sits in the office of his father, the president of United Auto Workers Local 652. "It's always been the family business. A great-paying job, with great benefits, close to home. It was pretty much everything I ever wanted. ... It's provided me with whatever I had growing up."

Straight out of high school, Rollin grabbed a job at a GM plant. With overtime and night shifts, he earned $37,000 in about nine months. Four years later, he bought a four-bedroom house. Now 23, he still holds out hope of returning — hope that "things turn around. I'd like to be there to see it happen."

The next few months, he figures, will determine his future — as well as that of GM.

‘It's been coming a long time’
The story of the Green family offers a glimpse into the ups and downs of the American auto industry over a half-century — from symbol of the nation's industrial might to the brink of collapse.

The Greens were around when GM was on top of the world, when Toyotas and Hondas were not yet part of the lexicon, much less a fixture on the nation's highways. They built Cutlasses, Skylarks and Grand Ams, they bought Camaros and Silverados, their union grew stronger, their paychecks got bigger.

But they were there, too, when the energy crisis took hold, the demand for smaller cars increased, foreign automakers started building plants in this country — and buying American lost its luster.

Today, as GM fights for survival, the Greens are emblematic of so many autoworkers who worry about the future and mull over the mistakes of the past — even as they acknowledge they're not completely surprised by the latest turn of events.

"It's been coming a long time, I saw it 25 years ago," declares Richard Green, who spent nearly 40 years at GM and the UAW before retiring in 1993. "I remember watching some small plants going under, wondering if it could happen to us. I thought it would and it did."

Darren Hauck / Getty Images Billy Bob Grahn holds up an American flag as the remaining workers at GM's Janesville, Wis., assembly plant leave after their final production line duties Dec. 23, 2008. After more than 85 years of vehicle production, the Janesville plant closed, leaving more than 1,200 employees without jobs.

Some nights, he says, his mind races thinking about all that went wrong.

"There's enough blame to go around," the 73-year-old Green says slowly, choosing his words carefully. "The quality dropped. We lost the loyalty of the customers. They stand for the national anthem, but they're not as patriotic as they should be. A lot of people will wave the flag ... but not buy an American-made car. If they can save 2 cents on an item made in China, they'll save that 2 cents."

His wife, Connie, another former GM worker, sees the problem through a wider lens.

"I wish I could come up with some magic solution to start building things here," she says. "I know it's a global economy, but I'm still old-fashioned enough to want to be able to take care of ourselves. ... Steel's gone. Textiles gone. And now autos."

Not quite.

The auto industry still employs hundreds of thousands of workers in this country, with much of the growth coming from foreign carmakers based in the nonunion South. One sign of the times: UAW membership, which peaked at 1.5 million in 1979, was about 465,000 by the end of 2007 — the first drop below a half-million since World War II.

As the Big Three carmakers slashed their workforce by about 40 percent — to about 241,000 — from 2001 to 2007, foreign automakers in the United States boosted employment by nearly a third, to more than 113,000, according to the Center for Automotive Research.

And while 2008 was a miserable year all around for automakers, GM marked its centennial in a sea of red ink: Shares plunged 87 percent. More than $21 billion in losses were recorded in the first three quarters. And car sales were at their worst in almost half a century.

"Being a blue-collar worker in a highly competitive environment is not a very pleasant place to be in a world that has gone flat," says Douglas Baird, a University of Chicago Law School professor and bankruptcy specialist who follows the industry. "Auto assembly-line jobs don't put you on the trajectory to the middle class anymore."

"The way the economy has evolved does not reward people who do those jobs," he adds. "It's not fair. It's not nice. Thirty years ago, the autoworkers could have shared in the prosperity. But GM is a shrinking ice cube."

‘A job for life’
The opportunities seemed boundless when Kenneth Green, Rollin's great-grandfather, started the family tradition toward the end of World War II.

At the time, automakers were phasing out of their wartime conversion that had turned car factories into defense plants, producing guns and bombs, tanks and planes and giving Detroit the nickname "arsenal of democracy."

Kenneth Green, a tall, bony, cribbage-loving, Detroit Tigers fan left his family's farm outside the village of Morrice — where they raised cattle and produced peppermint — and traveled about 25 miles to a new adventure in the city.

He became a tool and die maker at Oldsmobile, joining the UAW at a time when a labor agreement could be summed up in a pocket-size brochure. Today, the national contract is 716 pages.

When his son, Richard, turned 18, there were no heart-to-heart, career-direction discussions. He followed his dad's career, breaking only for a stint in the Marines.

At Oldsmobile, Richard's starting salary was about $2 an hour. Gas, though, was just 23 cents a gallon. And he was part of a corporation so powerful that former GM chief Charles Wilson famously summed it up this way: "What's good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa."

For Richard, a father of three and dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who later became a full-time UAW official, being an autoworker back then had one major attraction: security.

"If you went to work here, you were a good employee and you did things right, you'd have a job for life," he says. "My kids never had to worry about their next meal. I never thought about leaving."

Today, the elder Green, solemn-faced with a thatch of silver hair, snow-white mustache and glasses, remembers an era when Americans could carry their lunch buckets to the same factory their entire working lives.

He moved up from the assembly line to skilled tradesman. He bought an RV and took his family on vacations on both coasts. GM offered a ticket to the comforts of middle-class life.

MORE FROM AUTOS

Autos Section Front

CEO lays out ambitious Chrysler road map Cars are approaching ‘auto’ pilot mode Review: Toyota Venza falls short What automakers have in store for 2010 Ford to put air bags into back seat belts Clunker deals: old Ford pickups for new ones New Dodge models part of Chrysler’s plans U.S. rips Toyota statement on floor mats GM posts first sales gain in nearly two years General Motors board decides not to sell Opel Autos Section Front   Add Autos headlines to your news reader: