Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant by Paul Clemens

(Doubleday, 288 pages, $25.95)

Another American factory closing isn’t exactly “breaking news,” said Stephen J. Lyons in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. With U.S. plant closings running steady at about 100 per month, an on-the-ground look at any one of them might seem beside the point. But Detroit author Paul Clemens has “old-school-journalism chops to deliver a first-rate piece of deep reportage,” and he’s chosen a new angle. Following a group of men who make their livings by disassembling old “industrial carcasses,” he watches as they strip clean the nearly century-old Budd Detroit Automotive Plant, shipping off what’s usable to factories in Mexico or Brazil. In today’s Detroit, it turns out, a man who picks apart shuttered auto plants can earn more than any “newly hired worker on the Jeep Cherokee assembly line.”

Clemens doesn’t get to know this pack of “heavy-metal vultures” as well as you’d hope, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Though he’s the son of an auto worker, he acts “like a mewling yuppie” when his story requires that he probe deeper into the lives of the “rowdy, tattooed” itinerants who take these new gigs. Still, he’s created a powerful lament “for a dying way of being a man in America,” one that’s notable for its “lack of sourness.” As one local worker helps dismantle a large piece of machinery, he tells Clemens he hopes that Mexico’s families benefit from auto-industry jobs as much as his city once did. “It’s why we’re taking such care getting this thing out of here,” he says.

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In many ways, these “hard-drinking, heavy-smoking” men “bear no resemblance” to the autoworkers of the past, said Brian Ladd in the San Francisco Chronicle. They “hate labor unions,” preferring a more rules-free world. But even though they can be confident there’ll be another factory to denude once the Budd plant is done, they also know that their careers will never offer job security and pensions. Clemens describes them as “the American working class, mopping up after itself.” If this is “the future of American work,” it’s not a reassuring picture.