This NYT story looks at the Roy family of Michigan. Four generations have been supported by General Motors auto plant jobs. Now one of the current generation, employed by bankrupt GM spinoff Delphi, is looking at seeing his wages fall from $30 US/hr. to about $10 US/hr.

An excerpt:

"General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.

When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.

But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots." ...

In many ways, it was not the government but Detroit and other major industries, at the prodding of their unions, that created the American-style social safety net, and helped foster the shared prosperity that is now fracturing.

"The days when blue-collar work could be passed on down the family line, those days are over," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "Where you did have automobile plants it was always looked at as an elite job. It was hard work, but good, steady work, with wonderful benefits and good solid pay, and you were in the upper middle class."

Now, with G.M. and other domestic automakers and suppliers fighting to survive brutal global competition, Detroit is planning to cut even more manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the industry is moving to rewrite or even tear up its labor contracts in a bid to turn itself around by drastically reducing both wages and benefits. Today, Mr. Roy and Gerald, 71, who once helped him get his job, are both preparing to make sacrifices.

Robert S. Miller, the turnaround specialist who became chairman and chief executive of Delphi in July, said in an interview in October that Delphi and the United Auto Workers would have to grapple with how much to take from the retirees pockets and how much from workers.

"This is a tradeoff," he said. "I can't satisfy what everyone would like to have."

[But Delphi is pressing for such large cuts from both constituencies that one top U.A.W. leader, Richard Shoemaker, recently called the company's proposals a "roadmap for confrontation."] Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages from as much as $30 an hour to as little as $10.