By the mid-1990s, though, with the Big Three losing market share and staggering under the weight of their union contracts, it became difficult to find assembly-line work in a plant, particularly if you didn’t have a personal connection to the company. Hiring was governed almost exclusively by nepotism. If an automaker was looking to add workers, it invited existing employees to pass along a referral sheet — essentially a one-page job application — to a friend or relative. Nearly all of the autoworkers under the age of 40 whom I met in Detroit found their jobs through a family member.

This is how Marvin Powell got his start. When his father, a longtime G.M. line worker, first offered to refer him to the company, Powell said he felt conflicted. Like many second-generation autoworkers, he had never envisioned working in a plant. “I was going to make my money off my mind,” Powell told me one night. We were sitting in a crowded sports bar in suburban Detroit, watching the Cleveland Cavaliers make short work of the Pistons in the first round of the N.B.A. playoffs. “You figure when you’re young, before you know anything about life, you’ll go to college, get a degree and get a good job,” he said. “I wanted to be a TV anchor.” Powell laughed. “Working in a plant was a long way from being a TV anchor.”

After high school, Powell enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and was planning to major in mass communications and broadcasting, but he dropped out halfway toward his degree. He wasn’t the most focused student. What’s more, he had a weakness for trendy clothes and racked up about $800 in credit-card debt. His father was already covering his tuition; Powell didn’t want to ask him to pay off his credit cards too. And he was pretty sure his father wouldn’t be willing to anyway.

Out of college, Powell cycled through a series of jobs. He went to work for Foot Locker, first as a stock clerk and then in sales, made debt-collection calls for a finance company and did a stint in the mailroom of a bank. When the opportunity at G.M. arose in 1996, he was 26, already married and making $13 an hour as an office temp for I.B.M. The starting wage at General Motors was $13.65, and he would get a raise every six months. “As I thought more about it, it became a no-brainer,” he says. Powell submitted his referral sheet, and after a few simple tests — math, reading comprehension, manual dexterity — followed by a team-building exercise, a formal interview and a physical, he started working at Pontiac Assembly.

Powell had no idea what to expect. He had been inside an auto factory only once, as a 10-year-old on family day at his father’s plant, and his father had almost never talked about his job. After a weeklong orientation, he trained up and down the assembly line before being placed in a job attaching brake-fluid reservoirs. It was stressful at first. The line moved faster than he anticipated, and as a new hire who could be let go without cause during his first 90 days, he didn’t want to be the one to slow it down. Adjusting to the culture of the factory was a challenge, too. A practicing Christian, Powell was taken aback by what he saw taking place around him. The plant was a world of temptations unto itself, with drugs, alcohol, numbers runners, bookies and even “parking-lot girls” who would come to the plant during lunch breaks to service male workers. “Anything you can find outside the plant, you can find inside the plant,” Powell says. “You either get caught up in it, or stay apart from it.”

Powell gradually settled in at Pontiac Assembly and was soon piling on as much overtime as he could. In a good week, he worked four 12-hour days and a 16-hour day. Overtime was especially abundant between the beginning of November and Christmas, when hunting season caused rampant absenteeism at the plant. Within two years, he was making $18 an hour, and he and his wife soon saved up enough to put 3 percent down on their $150,000 three-bedroom house in Southfield.

Powell has tried periodically to get off the assembly line. Not long after he started at the plant, his foreman recommended him for management. Powell took the test, which uses hypothetical questions to gauge how you would respond to particular situations, but failed. “I guess I could have given them the answers they wanted, but that’s just not me,” he told me. “I’m going to be me — I’m going to be honest — I’m going to put down how I would do the job, and if that doesn’t line up with what you like, then that’s cool, I don’t take offense at that. I’m just not what you like.” A few years later, at his father’s urging, Powell tried to become a skilled tradesman, which would at least have given him a more transferable skill. He failed that test as well.