Southward Ho for Jobs

By Claudia Wallis

The auto industry's unemployed are migrating in droves

When the century was younger and Motown was Boomtown, jobs were for the picking on the conveyor belts of Detroit. Forrest Jones got one, leaving behind the dust of Piggott, Ark. So did Paul Youker's father, trading hard times in New York to be a security guard for General Motors. Terrace Turner's father got another, moving north from Mississippi.

But in just a generation, the boom has gone bust. Haifa million auto-related jobs have been lost since 1979, and migration today is away from Motor City, not toward it. Turner, 29, has gone to Arizona to look for work: "That's what my father did when we moved up to Detroit." Youker, 28, an engineer with Chrysler's defense division, headed for Los Angeles and a higher-paying job with Hughes Aircraft. Jones' daughter, Anita Cousins, 41, has taken the path most traveled by departing Michiganders. She has followed the Lone Star beacon to the plenty of Texas.

Signs of the exodus are all over the industrial North, but they show especially in Michigan, where 20,000 workers run out of unemployment benefits each month.

On a Wednesday in Dearborn, home of Ford Motor Co., the unemployed arrive by the hundreds at the Little Professor Book Center. There they snap up the local bestsellers--the Sunday Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Light--and open to "Help Wanted."

Others head for employment agencies like Career Personnel Inc., in Southfield, where Owner Stanley Blum is doing a "phenomenal" business preparing resumes for people seeking jobs down South. Perhaps the only business doing better than placement agencies is the moving trade. United Van Lines transported 533 households from Michigan to Texas in 1980, up from 293 the year before. UHaul's one-way southbound traffic in rental trucks has been so brisk that it creates chronic shortages up North.

The signs are no less evident at the other end of the migration. Michigan license plates abound on the freeways of Houston, where a thousand newcomers --black, white, young and old--arrive each week. Resumes are piled high on the desks of employment counselors in Houston, where 70,000 new jobs were created last year. Local radio station KILT now promotes itself with the message: "If you're from Detroit... you've found your station in Houston." Apartment agents have installed WATS lines to serve out-of-state callers. The waterfront apartment complex near Houston, where Anita Cousins lives, is dubbed "Michigan Manor"; at one point it housed 23 Michiganders in its 43 apartments. An odd coincidence in the 1980 census came as no surprise to Texans: Detroit had lost 321,841 people; Houston had gained 321,457.

Some of the migrants come with jobs already lined up. Tal Gonyea, 20, of Detroit is one. His training as a computer technician earned him an offer straight out of college from Texas Instruments in Houston. Yet a surprising number arrive without plans. "Some just call from the bus station and ask how to get here," says Foley Collins, of the Texas Employment

Commission's Houston office. Their fortunes will depend on the skills they bring. Lyle Cousins, 39, a truck driver from Goodrich, Mich., had no problem. "I came to Houston on a Friday, got my Texas driver's license on Monday and started work on Tuesday," says Cousins, whose living-room couch has been occupied ever since by friends and relatives in town to find a job.

Dennis Tibbitt, 39, a former Ford employee, and his wife Janet, 33, also fared well. Repeatedly out of work in Detroit, Dennis concluded that "there were only three things you could do: get out, starve or turn criminal." He got out, and found a bus-driving job in Houston in a matter of weeks. Says Janet, who found an illustrator's job in three days: "Up there, things are happening that you cannot control. Here I feel secure."

For others, especially those trained for specific auto-related jobs, the transition to the South is more difficult. "Many have skills that don't fit here," says Collins. An automotive machinist used to pushing buttons on an assembly line is not trained for the complicated work done by oil-industry machinists. White-collar workers also face problems. Detroit's Wade Cook, 48, a former railroad employee with 16 years of management experience, has sent scores of resumes to the Sunbelt without result. The difficulty, explains University of Houston Sociologist William Simon, is that the Texas economy is highly technical at the upper end and menial at the lower end, without much in between. The newcomers, he says, "cannot articulate with our economy. A lot of them are obsolete people from an obsolete environment, with obsolete skills."

For those with skills that transfer, the adjustment can also be difficult. George Duden, 36, formerly at Chrysler, likes his new job as an electrical engineer with Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. But as is often the case with those who leave the unionized North, he took a cut in pay and benefits--partly offset by lower taxes. Texas living, says his wife Susan, 29, is expensive, and their son "misses fishing in the Michigan lakes." Though Texans are friendly, Duden notes, "Amy Vanderbilt never got west of the Mississippi. There are rough edges down here."

The Horkenbachs of Royal Oak, Mich., agree. "We hated it," says Renette, 31, of her family's seven-month, $7,000 experiment in Sunbelt living. In Houston, her firefighter husband "had to pay extra to get us on his health insurance," their utility bills were "exorbitant," and Yankees were unpopular. So when Robert Horkenbach was offered his old job back in Royal Oak, he took it. "No way" will they again leave their familiar Michigan turf, says Renette--even though Robert again faces a familiar Michigan layoff. --By Claudia Wallis. Reported by Christopher Redman/Detroit and Robert C. Wurnrtstedt/Houston

With reporting by Christopher Redman, Robert C. Wurnrtstedt

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.