Roger and Me, the Plant Closings, and the Long Fall
Near Flint, Michigan
In nineteen seventy-eight, General Motors employed eighty thousand people in the Flint area. Thirty years later, that number was eight thousand. The story of what happened in between is the story of deindustrialization, and Flint lived it more completely than almost any other American city.
The downturn began with the oil shocks of the nineteen seventies, when American consumers began buying fuel-efficient Japanese cars and GM's large vehicle lineup looked suddenly obsolete. Plants began to close. Workers were laid off. By the mid-nineteen eighties, unemployment in Flint ran at twenty percent overall, and fifty percent among young Black men.
In nineteen eighty-nine, a filmmaker from Flint named Michael Moore released a documentary called Roger and Me, in which he followed his own attempts to meet with General Motors chairman Roger Smith and bring him to see what the plant closings had done to Flint. Smith declined every interview. Moore filmed the evictions, the empty storefronts, the people who moved to other cities, and the ones who stayed and improvised. The film was not subtle, but the facts it described were not disputable. Thirty-five thousand jobs had vanished from a city that had been built entirely around those jobs.
By nineteen ninety, General Motors employed twenty-three thousand people in Flint, down from eighty thousand a decade earlier.
Buick City, the vast northeast side complex that had employed nearly thirty thousand workers at its peak, closed for good in nineteen ninety-nine. The site sat contaminated and largely vacant for years. Redevelopment has been slow and partial. The school district contracted along with the tax base. The population fell from nearly two hundred thousand in nineteen sixty to eighty-one thousand by two thousand twenty.
The plant closings did not happen all at once. They happened in waves, over decades, each one eroding the city a little more. The people who stayed, and many did, watched the economy they had built their lives around disassemble itself piece by piece.
