	OFII: Newsroom

The Washington Post
Sue Anne Pressley
May 11, 2001

The South's New-Car Smell;
As Auto Plants Replace Region's Textile Mills, An Economy and a Way of Life Undergo Changes
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In her previous life in the hills of the upstate, Lane Jones spent her workdays making denim cloth. The job was dusty, hot and monotonous, she said, and the low pay kept her dreams of owning a home just beyond reach.

That was before she went to work six years ago as an "associate," as employees are called, at BMW Manufacturing. With her annual salary and overtime topping $ 56,000, she has been able to buy a three-bedroom house. She drives a new BMW sedan she leases in a bargain deal. And she's the envy of her relatives and friends, she said, who always are begging her to help them get jobs with the automaker.

"It's a day-and-night difference. I love these cars -- all that good-smelling leather," said Jones, 46, as she did final inspections on shiny new X5 sport-utility vehicles in the BMW colors of "Arctic silver" and "Topaz blue."

Here in the New Automotive South, some of the same workers who once spun the yarn and wove the fabrics that clothed America are putting together the vehicles America drives. As many of the world's best-known automakers -- BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Toyota -- choose the South as their new home, a historic shift is occurring in this region once known for its low-skilled, low-paying jobs and its isolation from the rest of the world.

The arrival of the automakers, along with other high-tech industries producing computers and other durable goods, is changing the lives of southerners who, like Jones, often felt trapped in dead-end jobs. Small towns in Tennessee, Alabama and, now, Mississippi are experiencing explosive new life as the automakers bring in thousands of jobs with above-average wages, attracting hundreds of related businesses making steering wheels and rubber hoses, and conveying a new aura of glamour. No one in tiny Vance, Ala., minds being known as the home of the Mercedes M Class (which retails for about $ 35,000).

In a few short years, the image of southern textile workers with bits of cotton lint clinging to their hair, living in modest mill-village homes, has given way to the southern technician or auto associate wearing a white lab coat and able to speak a few words of German or Japanese and relate to the global village. As the region's textile and apparel industries have lost thousands of jobs to more efficient technology or to plants in Mexico or other countries with cheaper labor, the South has sprung back by gaining the interest of foreign companies -- the automakers being the most coveted example. And state and local officials are more than eager to bid them welcome.

The growth of the southern auto industry, most of it since the 1990s, has been dazzlingly fast: These days, at least one-third of the vehicles turned out in the United States have southern roots, and Tennessee, which did not produce a single vehicle in 1980, ranks third among automaking states. Despite a slumping economy, the rapid development continues, with new projects unveiled -- Nissan recently broke ground on a billion-dollar plant in rural Mississippi -- and massive expansions announced at plants in Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.

In what are still small but telling ways, the arrival of the newcomers -- or just the anticipation of their arrival -- is beginning to have an impact on the local culture. Take what is happening in Lincoln, Ala., population 4,500, about 55 miles east of Birmingham, where Honda plans to begin producing its Odyssey minivan next fall.

For the past year, Pat Borstorff, an international business professor at nearby Jacksonville State University, has been holding seminars for business groups in a six-county area on how to deal with potential Japanese visitors -- advising them, among other things, to tone down their "touchy-feely" southern effusiveness out of respect for the more formal Asian culture.

"In the South, it doesn't take us very long to go from 'Hi, how are you?' to patting you on the arm. In other cultures, they are more distant," Borstorff said. "When the Japanese meet you, they're trying to decide, 'Is this somebody I want to do business with?' It's a fact-finding thing."

As part of their efforts to make the Japanese automaker feel at home, Alabamians have made sure the official highway signs welcoming Honda at the Lincoln exit on Interstate 20 are in English and Japanese. Local business leaders also have been ordering new business cards, English on one side, Japanese on the other.

But these gestures, while sincere, probably weren't necessary: Most of Honda's 1,500 associates will end up being local folk.

"The Germans have not taken Tuscaloosa," said Jacksonville State history professor Harvey H. Jackson, referring to the closest city to the Mercedes plant, "and we're not expecting any Japanese restaurants around here."

The irony of automakers targeting the South these days is not lost on former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, who was instrumental in luring one of the first of the new entries, Nissan, to Smyrna, Tenn., 35 miles southeast of Nashville, in the early 1980s. What is happening now, he says, is a twist on the sad story of the 1930s and 1940s, when southerners desperate to better their lives felt they had to leave their small towns and family farms to work in the auto factories and tire plants of Michigan and other industrial states.

"It's nice when they play that old song 'Detroit City' on the jukebox to know that the grandsons and granddaughters of the mountaineers and field hands who went to Detroit to get a job are now back in Tennessee working for Saturn and other auto manufacturers in the South," said Alexander, whose frequent courting trips to Japan resulted in his book "Friends: Tennessee and Japan."

But this is not really a case of Detroit moving to Dixie. Except for General Motors' Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., and much older GM and Ford assembly plants near Atlanta, all of the automakers are foreign-based companies that are new players on the American manufacturing scene. Their coming was triggered by a change in U.S. policy in the late 1970s, Alexander said, that forced them to begin producing their vehicles in the United States if they intended to keep selling them here.

As they scouted potential locations, most of the companies zoomed in on the South. "We discovered the South 20 years ago. We like the South. . . . We like the work ethic," said Emil Hassan, Nissan's senior vice president of North American manufacturing, who said the company never looked beyond the region.

There were other attractions: cheap land and plenty of it; up-to-date interstate highways and seaports; a new regional emphasis on education; and local and state governments eager to lure business. In this fiercely competitive arena, automakers have been offered new roads and airport runways, immense tax breaks, job training programs and other lures.

Mississippi lawmakers, in a lavish move that drew a bit of criticism, even met in special session last November to approve a $ 295 million incentives package for Nissan, building on efforts they already had launched to attract major new projects. Likewise, Alabama officials made similar overtures to the carmakers they were wooing, bringing together a $ 158 million incentive package for Honda and $ 119 million more for Mercedes-Benz.

Although it remains a touchy subject, the historic lack of unions in southern industries also may have been a consideration. All of the new automaking operations in the South are nonunion, except for GM's Saturn plant, and several attempts at unionizing Mercedes-Benz in Vance, Ala., have failed. But union organizers say they remain optimistic.

"We've had some activity in the South, some organizing drives, some success," said Bob King, vice president and director of national organizing for the United Auto Workers, who estimates the union's membership in the South at "somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000," involving related auto parts plants.

But King said he does not buy the idea anymore that the South is harder to crack than other regions. "I don't think so," he said, "but a lot of people believe that stereotype."

Ferrel Guillory, director of the southern program at the University of North Carolina, believes that the banishment of another southern stereotype paved the way for the automakers' interest in the region.

"Surely, the lifting of Jim Crow laws, the improvement in race relations, has had an effect. The South is not a pariah of a region anymore," said Guillory, who also is co-author of "The State of the South," an annual socioeconomic report published by the research firm MDC Inc. that this year highlights the region's new global profile.

"I don't want to say the passage of the Voting Rights Act led directly to Nissan going to Mississippi," he said, "but business executives were reluctant to invest in the South 30 or 40 years ago."

Certainly, the old textile industry was known as a bastion for white workers, male and female, while blacks were consigned to maintenance jobs at best. "One of the concerns in the early 20th century was that textiles would take away black labor from the farms," Jackson said. "Sometimes there were actually formal arrangements -- textiles would be whites-only. Other industries would not hire black labor during picking and planting seasons."

In contrast, the new automakers say they are committed to creating a diverse workforce. Twenty percent of the 4,300 associates at the BMW plant in Greer, S.C., for example, are minorities, and 30 percent are women, said spokeswoman Bunny Richardson.

When Honda announced its intentions to locate in northern Alabama last year, company spokesman Jeffrey Smith set out to meet with every minority leader and organization he could find.

"I said, 'I am here to do some proactive listening. Tell me what's on your mind,' " Smith said. "And they said that they hoped we would reflect the community where we were working and living. And we assured them that that was exactly what we intended to do, that we were committed to diversity."

Running a loom in one of the old textile mills was a solitary, if noisy, undertaking. Many of the new automakers employ a team approach using a half-dozen to a dozen associates who are trained for up to eight weeks. They labor in light-filled, high-ceilinged spaces, like the immaculate BMW plant here, strung with bright banners touting the latest product lines. That unmistakable new-car smell permeates the air.

"There are no blue-collar workers in these plants," Alexander said. "They make $ 40,000 a year. They're exactly the kinds of jobs the region needs."

Recent history has shown that interest in these jobs is phenomenal; when BMW put out the call for its first round of applicants in 1994, 60,000 people responded. Both Lane Jones and her fellow associate Andy Rau, 41, felt lucky to be chosen.

Growing up in Michigan in the middle of the aging auto industry there, Rau had taken a vow, he said, that he would never work for an automaker. But five years ago, he found BMW's wages -- 50 percent more than he made at his old job in hospital maintenance -- too attractive to ignore.

He also was surprised, he said, to find how much fun it was to work with the gleaming new Z3 roadsters and coupes. Nowadays a big booster, he said he hopes that "one day, my children will replace me here."

The automakers say they intend to stick around for the long haul, come what may with the American economy. "Naturally, it is upsetting when you see a slowdown," said Nissan's Hassan. "But our plans are long-term plans, and our investment really is for entering a segment of the market we have not been competing in -- the full-size pickup and the SUV."

Others point out that the textile industry, which provided steady employment to several generations of farm kids and paid for many a son's and daughter's college education, once seemed invincible as well.

"It is true that auto manufacturing is to the early part of the 21st century what cloth-making was 100 years ago, and in this sense, they are mobile enterprises, pardon the pun," said UNC's Guillory. "Hopefully, Mercedes in Alabama and Nissan in Mississippi will transform the economy, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be there forever and ever."

For residents of the latest southern town to welcome an automaker, Canton, Miss., population 12,000, the coming of Nissan has produced excitement, but also a touch of apprehension. The old farm-market town, 20 miles north of Jackson, with its preserved courthouse square, already had earned the title "Movie Capital of Mississippi" after lending scenes to the movies "A Time to Kill" and "My Dog Skip."

"Oh everybody's glad to see 'em come, and everything else along with it," said barbershop owner Bobby Chandler. "But we've got some mixed emotions. We don't really know what to expect -- except growth and more growth."

And, no doubt, a lot of change. Nothing attests to that as clearly as the site of the new plant. It will sit on what was once the reigning symbol of the Old South: a cotton field.