On Monday their paychecks stop, and the long days at home start.
Wall Street, Washington and Big Labor are playing double-dare chicken over their future. Half of America seems to think they're greedy crybabies; the other half, hapless victims. But the people who make Chevrolet Tahoes and GMC Yukons just want to get back to work.
"The best thing I can do is just try and survive and not worry about things," says Ed Tilley, a quality manager at General Motors' White Marsh transmission plant who, like thousands of GM workers, faces a two-month furlough.
"You talk to people who survived the Great Depression," said Tilley, whose wife stopped work at GM last year and whose home equity disappeared after he bought his Bel Air house in 2007. "They had it a lot worse than us. I consider myself lucky that I have a job in eight weeks."
He hopes so. On Friday, the White Marsh plant and its 200 employees went into "cold shutdown," a dire description that they pray will be belied by a GM revival.
The assembly lines ran till they were empty. The air conditioning got cycled down. Extra parts got zipped into moisture-proof containers. By lunchtime, the parking lot of Maryland's premier manufacturing facility was nearly empty.
White Marsh and dozens of other GM plants have entered sleep mode so that weak demand can catch up with glutted supply. A bad economy plastered sales and jammed dealerships with metal.
The company sold less than two-thirds of the cars and trucks this winter that it moved a year previously. And last year stunk.
Meanwhile GM is three weeks away from either a bankruptcy filing or an immediate, painful bout of layoffs, plant closings and restructuring. Or both.
Many workers seem to be rooting for option No. 2 as the lesser evil. You've heard about the politicians, bankers and bigwigs clashing over GM's future. Here are the folks whose livelihoods are on the line.
"If they file, it's going to be a whole new ballgame," said Leroy Bannister, 60, who works on the White Marsh line and worries pensions and retirement health plans could fare even worse in bankruptcy than in an out-of-court settlement. "That's my utmost thought right now. If they close, I can retire. I've got the time. But retire to what?"
More than 5,000 metro Baltimoreans who have retired from GM wonder the same thing.
