Video: Indiana 2009: Fort Wayne

I don't worry about how the future is gonna be because there's always gonna be a demand for trucks, some level of truck for the guy who does replacement windows to the construction people, someone's gonna buy a fleet of 10 trucks or someone needs 250 trucks for their company, or someone needs a truck just 'cause that's what they've always had to have was a truck for their life. So there's gonna be a need for trucks. You have to look at the capacity that the company is now building versus the capacity that they built just a year ago. There were more facilities building at the minimum. Fort Wayne assembly is gonna build this year alone with the 10 weeks of shutdown, quite a few less trucks, but in a good year if you're working those 50 weeks out of the year, you're gonna see yourself putting out 230 to 240,000 trucks. Now you've taken a couple of plants out of that mix. So now you only have a couple of facilities. In this case, Pontiac soon to leave the process, Flint and Fort Wayne building trucks. There's still gonna be demand. So I don't think that's gonna lessen what we do here every day. To look back at it. I look at things in a history context. And when you talk about the government jumping in and taking over auto industry, I'm initially concerned about that. And then I see historically nothing like that has ever been done. And I realized that an administration past or pre passed beyond the last administration wouldn't even have stepped in. Let the business do whatever the market demands. I think it was the right thing to do to help them out. If you look at how Chrysler came in and out of bankruptcy, you look at how General Motors came in and out of bankruptcy, dramatic changes among their organizations, but it was the help that those companies needed. Unfortunately, there's plenty of other companies in this country, the RV industry and others who are saying, what about us? Why didn't you come help us out? When you look at a worker today, there's been through a layoff. The folks that are here, whether they came from a closed plant, or they came from hired locally off the street here in 1995 or 2000, they didn't know layoff. They've worked here for years and had nothing but boom times where there was employment, there was employment, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases. So to go down to collecting unemployment, that is a big change for people. If you look at the perspective of the person that lives down the block from you and doesn't have anything to do with General Motors, they think you're just at summer camp. You're like one of those teachers, who's got three months off all summer long. There's a jealousy of, a lot of people could never do the work that the folks do on this line here. People say, oh, any chimpanzee could do that work. Actually, I would challenge that chimp to be consistently there on time and do that job consistently and read what it takes to do that job. Stand there on the monotony of doing that job all day long. Most people can't do that. So it's easy just to throw stones and hate the people because they make all this money and then they're laid off and they make all this money and then they go back to work and then they complain. So it's easy to throw stones at them, but let's look at the thing historically here in Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne had an international harvester facility that built the scout and other vehicles through the fifties, sixties and seventies, which closed in the early eighties. And at that time, this town had probably five to 6,000 with engineering staff and people building the vehicle were out of work. And that changed this whole dynamic of the community dramatically. Who was to blame in the local media at that time in the mid eighties? The UAW. They blame the union for it. Did the union have control of design of the vehicle? No. Did the union have control over what product line they built or allocation of assets? None whatsoever. They had local work rule things, but that didn't you couldn't dig that deep into it. The story to be told is that union ruined everything. No, it wasn't. They were asking for a wage to be given that was reliable each week with benefits so that they can build a vehicle and be compensated for their work and the amount of abuse they're getting on their body. So you take that in three years later in 86, they announced that Fort Wayne Assembly General Motors is gonna be built and they're building a plant here. And that changed the mindset of the community. And there's a whole bunch of businesses in this community who have been spawned from the amount of people who've come here and transferred here. There's an animosity here because there's some folks that lived here in this town who couldn't get a job here because the UAW had negotiated with General Motors, that if you're going to build a facility, you're gonna transfer people from another facility to come here. So there's some historical context to that. The dad who lost a job at international harvester, who went on to do something else, then his son now is of age and could easily work in this facility, but couldn't get a job out here 'cause some person came from Anderson, Indiana or Michigan or New York and came and took his job. So there's some always gonna be a little tough rub there too. For me, when I look at electric trucks, I look at towing capacity, torque, gas mileage is wonderful, but can it haul the fifth wheel trailer? Is it gonna haul all those tools to the construction site? Is it gonna be in four wheel drive and get them out of that hole that they just dug themselves into? Can you put a winch on the front of it not rip off the front bumper? Is the frame going to be robust enough to do the job that it was asked to do? I liked the idea of where they're headed to, but then it still in a guy's truck mind, isn't a truck to them. It's still just an electric car that's a little bit bigger than the previous car that they were driving.