"No golden parachutes," said Doug Hanscom, who has spent 32 years with GM and lives in Dundalk.
He worked at GM's Broening Highway plant until it closed in 2005 and since August 2006 has commuted to Delaware with a dozen other Baltimore residents. His job at the plant is to ferry doors, windshields and other material from the staging area to the assembly line.
Hanscom blames GM management for making "pretty foolish decisions," such as pinning the company's fortunes to gas-guzzling SUVs for much of this decade.
He also wonders why the Delaware factory has been building the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky - "beautiful" roadsters that are impractical in today's market. (The plant also makes an export version, the Opel GT, which goes to Europe.) He wishes he could build a hot seller like the Chevy Malibu or Cobalt.
A GM spokesman, John Raut, said, "Of course people are concerned" at the plant. But "for the most part, people have been positive."
Meanwhile, Hanscom, 56, says leaders of the United Auto Workers union have been too willing to grant contract concessions.
He's luckier than some, though. Because of seniority, he'll still have a job when the plant cuts back from two shifts daily to one on Dec. 8, just a week after resuming production next month. And by 2012, when the plant is no longer scheduled to have a model to make, he'll have 35 years at GM, enough for an above-average pension.
That's assuming he has a pension to collect. He has heard that if GM went bust, its pension obligations might be "dumped on" the federal government, and the $3,000 a month he's banking on would be $1,000 - just enough for his house and van payments. Divorced and childless, Hanscom has only himself to worry about. Although he has a 401(k) plan, he had invested heavily in free-falling GM stock, so his balance has tumbled.
"I wish I could be more optimistic," he said. "It's just that experience has taught me I can't trust General Motors or UAW leadership to do right by me."
Lately he has pondered a post-GM reality that until recently was unfathomable: "I don't want to end up as a greeter at Wal-Mart."
One of his fellow commuters is Wanda Hopkins, a 54-year-old assembly line worker who lives in Pasadena. She is just over a year away from hitting three decades with the company. At that point she'd qualify for her pension.
