CHICAGO (Chicago Tribune) -- After 10 years of installing front seats in Ford cars that roll by at a rate of about one a minute, Kevin Gogins says he has had enough. "It's been a rough experience," said Gogins, 41, of Hammond, Ind. "It's a lot of heavy-duty work, and it's more difficult now because they eliminate jobs and give people more work to do."

Gogins is one of nearly 1,000 Ford Motor Co. workers at the Chicago assembly plant and 38,000 nationally who are trading the security of a well-paying job protected by the United Auto Workers for a buyout check and, in his case, a roll of the dice on the future.

With a base hourly wage of about $28, union members such as Gogins make close to $58,000 a year on straight time and collect most of their base pay and benefits if they're laid off. "The money is what keeps you there, but the work is hard. I'm too tired to do anything with my family when I come home. It's taken a lot out of me," he said. "I've had enough."

Gogins took a $100,000 buyout that will dwindle to about $68,000 after taxes. He intends to be a full-time minister in Hammond, with plans to open a food pantry and a homeless shelter.

"Plan B" to support his family is to buy foreclosed houses, make repairs and sell them at a profit, an idea he developed after attending a real estate class at the Ford plant as part of the union's educational benefits.

If that sounds risky, he says so was staying at the Ford plant. "Things are getting shaky at Ford. They just closed down the Atlanta plant, and that was one of their biggest. In the future, they might close down Chicago too," Gogins said. (The company has long maintained that it has no plans to do that.) "When they said they would never make this offer again, that told me right there that I ought to take it. I knew I had a better chance of going on my own, being a businessman, an entrepreneur."

UAW membership peaked at 1.5 million in 1979 and fell to less than 600,000 earlier this year. And though there have been several plant closings at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler Group, the decline is attributed largely to workers who had put in 30 years and retired with a full pension and health-care benefits.

But of the 38,000 Ford UAW members who accepted buyout or retirement packages this year--46 percent of the automaker's hourly workforce--fewer than half took retirement offers. Most accepted lump-sum buyouts of $100,000 to $140,000 or signed up for tuition for education or training while collecting reduced pay.

Roland Zullo, a labor researcher at the University of Michigan, speculates that most Ford workers leaving fall into two groups: those who could retire and younger workers who felt vulnerable at an ailing automaker undergoing a sea change.

"These are the folks who are probably in danger of losing their jobs because they have lower seniority rights if their plants close," Zullo said of the latter.

And the prospects aren't bright for workers who lose manufacturing jobs. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says manufacturing workers have a harder time than workers in general finding new jobs, and they tend to take the biggest wage cuts to do so.

"For workers to accept buyouts reflects their fear for the future and their desire to grab something that was certain," said Harley Shaiken, a University of California-Berkeley labor expert. "For many, that $140,000 is real today. There's a real fear that Ford may survive but that most of its manufacturing jobs will go elsewhere."

Though many departing Ford workers will have a hard time finding jobs that pay close to UAW wages, Zullo said some are skilled tradesmen, such as electricians, die makers and metal workers, who are in demand.

"They probably can find work, if not in the automotive sector then in some other industry," he said.