Michigan Safety Net for Boomers Frays on Bankrupt Detroit

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-12/michigan-safety-net-frays-as-detroit-s-bankruptcy-tests-boomers.html

There’s a made-in-Michigan quality to Art Reyes, a third-generation autoworker with a pension, retiree health benefits and income that enabled him to send three of his four children to college.

He’s a product of the old Michigan, which gave birth to organized labor, worker protections and wages that propelled the middle class. That Michigan is almost gone. Now overseeing the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy in Detroit, the state is at the forefront again, this time playing host to the unraveling of the homemade fabric that cloaked and comforted working families for generations.

“I’m literally one of the last at my facility to have a defined pension and health care as a retiree,” said Reyes, 45, a General Motors Co. employee and president of UAW Local 651 in Flint. His unit has 800 members, down from 9,000 when he joined in 1991.

Just as the bankruptcy of Detroit, the city that put the nation on wheels a century ago, is a symbol of urban decay, the effort to fix it through cost-cutting measures may set a stricter made-in-Michigan standard for the rest of the U.S.