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DETROIT Scott Swiercz smoked a cigarette and drank a beer at The Final Score lounge in Brownstown Township, Mich., mulling the biggest gamble of his life. Ford Motor Co. had offered him and its 75,000 other U.S. hourly workers a choice of buyout packages. One option: A $100,000 lump-sum payment to sever his relationship with Ford. Taking the money would mean no job and no health care. For Swiercz, 40, who has two ex-wives and pays $157.50 each week in child support for his 14-year-old son, taking the buyout would be the equivalent of a third divorce. The math just didn't work. The cheapest health insurance he found cost $450 a month. With child support, he'd pay $1,080 each month before he paid rent or put gas in the car. Like all hourly workers, he had to make a decision by Nov. 27. He chose to stay on the production line at Ford's Woodhaven Stamping Plant, where he's weeks away from hitting 11 years seniority. He's gambling that the plant will stay open. He's gambling that, if it does, enough workers will take buyouts so Ford can avoid layoffs there. He's gambling that a worker from a closing plant who has more seniority won't bump him off the job. For hourly workers at Ford, making a decision on the buyout offers required a combination of economic calculations and soul searching. Some 38,000 Ford workers roughly half of Ford's U.S. hourly work force said they would take one of Ford's eight buyout packages. The workers who are staying are every bit as nervous as those starting over. The buyout and the future have been the dominant topic of conversation at the Woodhaven plant for six months, Swiercz said. "You talk to 25 people a day, that's what 10 people are talking about," he said. "Not, 'How are your kids?' or 'What are you doing for Christmas?' (It's) 'You taking the buyout? Everybody's worried about everything now." Hard times at Ford, General Motors Corp., DaimlerChrysler and their suppliers mean hard times for Michigan, where all three are based and where the auto industry dominates the economy. The state is on track to lose 336,000 jobs between mid-2000 and the end of 2006, the longest stretch of job losses since the Great Depression. Contracts expire between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three in 2007, and some argue union concessions are the only way the Big Three can compete with Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.

UAW critics say union work rules make it nearly impossible to fire a bad worker. A 21/2-hour lunch for a union worker at one of the bars near a plant wasn't unheard of. And union workers didn't pay a penny for health insurance until last year; now a family pays only $700 a year, said Donald Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations.

Auto workers counter that it's punishing work.

Cynthia Allison was a single mother raising a daughter, Donielle, and getting welfare before she got a job at Ford's Dearborn Truck plant. Nothing had prepared her for how physically punishing it would be.

Her first day, "I kept saying, 'The money, Cindy, the money. A future for you and for Donny.' When I got off that 4 a.m. shift, each step I took, my head said, 'Boom. Boom. Boom.'"

She's stayed at Ford 12 years. She's popped her knee, she's popped her back, she cut herself, she got hit in the head with a Mustang.

Allison, 41, who also raised one of her nieces, is taking the $100,000 buyout.

"I think I would be more afraid to stay than I am nervous to leave," she said.