Dale Foster spent 15 years helping to build Chryslers. Now, he sells them.
A year after the last vehicle rolled off an assembly line at the Fenton site where Chrysler manufactured cars, trucks and minivans for more than a half-century, Foster, a former plant pipefitter, is again gainfully employed.
His new employer, Glendale Chrysler Dodge Jeep, overlooked Foster's lack of sales experience by hiring him in March. The irony isn't lost on Foster.
"It kind of helped that I knew a little bit about (the product)," he said with a chuckle.
As Foster learns his new trade, scores of other employees of the Fenton plant are still finding their way back from a plant closure that kicked nearly 700 Chrysler workers to the street a year ago.
Many ex-Chrysler workers continue to collect unemployment and severance benefits; others are laboring at part-time jobs or have landed in Chrysler plants elsewhere. And a significant number have begun the process of reinventing themselves.
"You can't go to any college in this area without finding Chrysler guys," said Gordon Douglas, a state employee who manages the Regional Collaboration Center in Fenton. The center joins state, federal and local agencies in the push to assist and retrain workers displaced by Chrysler and other area businesses and corporations.
Camaraderie Endures
Fifteen years ago, Chrysler's two Fenton plants employed nearly 8,000 and the Big Three automakers employed a combined 15,000 locally. Now, Wentzville's General Motors plant carries only one shift.
An estimated 350 Chrysler workers - and perhaps more - qualified for a transfer and relocated to Michigan, Illinois and Indiana to continue collecting a paycheck from Chrysler.
Scattered across the St. Louis region and the Midwest, the former co-workers now rely on a Facebook page to stay abreast of marriages, deaths and other plant scuttlebutt.
Foster understands the lingering sway of a factory that closed its doors the first week in July 2009.
"It was the best job I ever had. The camaraderie, the good friends. There was hope (that Chrysler would spare the site) right up to the end," said Foster, who was out of work seven months before landing the sales job.
As Foster reports to the showroom each day, his former co-workers are in various phases of transition from the assembly line.
Greg Moore, a lifelong resident of Fenton, now punches a clock at the Chrysler stamping plant in Warren, Mich.
In the event Chrysler ceased operations here, the United Auto Workers contract called on the company to give Fenton employees priority, based on seniority, for the opportunity to fill openings at other manufacturing sites.
With 16 years on the line in Fenton, Moore wasn't certain he would make the cut.
"I got in by the luck of the draw," he says.
Actually, it was more than that.
Single and with his children grown, he had the advantage of flexibility.
"For me, it wasn't that big a deal," said Moore, a veteran who had previously lived away from Fenton for the eight years he served in the Army. "It wasn't like I was hauling little kids along with me, worrying about school. I just threw everything in my Jeep and headed up here."
In for the long haul
The vast majority of ex-Chrysler employees chose not to pack the car or summon the moving van.
"Each person had a different scenario to consider for their family," said 23-year Chrysler veteran Sally Sowards.
Bruce Wood, another former pipefitter, has one child in high school, another in college and a wife gainfully employed in another field.
"I had too many commitments in St. Louis," he said. "Even if I'd been tapped to go to Indiana or Michigan, it just wasn't a good option for me."
In their continued employment in the auto industry, Greg Moore and Dale Foster are anomalies.
All indicators suggest that a substantial amount of time might pass before the colleagues they once worked beside also find their footing.
"There is plenty of evidence we should be worried about (other laid-off Chrysler workers)," said Josh Bivens, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute.
Only 60 percent of the workers displaced by mass layoffs during the 2001 recession found employment within two years of losing their jobs, said Bivens.
Upon earning a paycheck, he added, those workers generally brought home 10 percent less than they did prior to the layoff.
Bivens says displaced manufacturing workers tend to fare a little worse than the overall work force in the job market because they are older and, for the most part, lack a college education.
"No one is coming out of this recession in terribly great condition," he said. "And this group of workers (is) no exception."
Early intervention
Still, as Douglas points out, scores, if not hundreds of ex-Fenton employees are doing their best to beat the hand dealt them last year by Chrysler.
He and Joseph Ruzicka - the St. Louis Community College liaison to the Regional Collaboration Center - have been down this road before.
Both helped oversee the effort to redirect the 1,300 blue- and white-collar workers who lost their jobs when Ford Motor Co. shuttered its Hazelwood assembly plant in 2006.
"We learned from Ford that early intervention is the best way" for laid-off autoworkers to re-enter the job market, said Ruzicka.
Another lesson: The generous severance packages hammered out by the United Auto Workers on behalf of its members tend to delay the process by lulling autoworkers into a false sense of financial security.
"It's difficult to get them to understand that it's not going to last forever," said Douglas.
Reality hits once the money starts to run out.
"When they see the end of the road, that's when they make a decision," said Ruzicka.
It's at that point that workers start studying the alternatives presented by various assistance programs, including a $3.2 million federal retraining grant, meant to prepare them for the next phase of their careers.
Many of the Ford workers, Douglas says, gravitated to the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning trade.
The resulting glut of heating-and-air technicians produced its own complications when the economy tanked, decimating all sectors - heating and air conditioning included - of the area construction industry.
Wood, the one-time pipefitter, represents the Chrysler workers who planned a new course before the balance on a severance-funded bank account dwindled.
His eye on the future, Wood enrolled in a precision welding course last year at Ranken Technical College shortly after Chrysler closed.
Double Whammy
His objective, landing a job as a pipefitter with AmerenUE, fell through when the utility suspended hiring in that division shortly before Wood completed the course.
"Timing is everything," Wood shrugged, noting that Ameren, like the auto industry, is at the mercy of a market economy.
"Chrysler isn't buying electricity anymore," he points out. "(Ameren) is hurting, too."
Wood is again waiting out the return of the job market at Ranken, where he is enrolled in another specialized welding class.
Meanwhile, he is supplementing his wife's income as best he can with the occasional plumbing job.
"Let's just say I'm scrounging for work," he said.
It's the intent of the retraining agendas at the collaboration center and other sites to ensure that Chrysler workers don't find themselves in similar straits.
A major push, fueled by the $3.2 million federal grant, is steering the unemployed toward programs geared to hybrid electric vehicle maintenance, hazardous material handling training, indoor environmental certification and 19 additional "green jobs."
Douglas refers to the process as "career building."
In addition to green jobs, the coursework thus far has ranged from dog grooming to health care.
The latter field is where Leon Busenhart expects to land.
Busenhart, of Gerald, spent 15 years at the Pacific subsidiary of Integram, the company that manufactured and supplied seating components for Chrysler vehicles built in Fenton.
Choosing retraining
To Busenhart, opportunity knocked when Integram joined other area Chrysler suppliers that shut their doors in the aftermath of the No. 3 domestic automaker's decision to cease operations here.
By the time the dust settled, 500 Integram employees were out of a job.
From that point forward, as Busenhart saw it, "You could learn a new trade or you get stuck in another factory for the rest of your life."
Busenhart was not inclined to go that route.
Nor did he see much of a future in construction, heating and air or other trades that emerge from a "quick-fix degree."
Funded by savings and training act funds and inspired by a lifelong devotion to physical fitness, he set out to become a physical therapist assistant.
Now halfway through an intensive PTA curriculum offered by Linn Technical College outside Jefferson City, Busenhart is more confident than ever that the switch from manufacturing to health care was the best decision for him and his family.
"No matter what, (health care) is going to grow," he said.
Outside Detroit, Greg Moore is equally confident that Chrysler will ultimately weather the upheaval that forced two of the Big Three domestic automakers into bankruptcy and reorganization.
Moore still has a home in Fenton. He returns often, although not as frequently as "some of the guys who go back there every weekend."
Moore laments missing Cardinals baseball and Blues hockey. He has not yet acclimated to Detroit venues that serve Miller instead of Anheuser-Busch products.
Still, the car industry is in his blood.
And the willingness and ability to uproot the life he had in Missouri gives Miller the luxury of making good on a vow that slipped from hundreds of former co-workers the moment the last Dodge Ram rolled off the line.
"I'm going to stay here until I retire," he pledged.
