You may not want to listen to Dakar McDonald. You may not be sympathetic to his predicament. But the guy tells a story that's worth hearing because of what it says about Detroit's reckoning.

And an era's final gasps.

He's 36. He's a husband, the father of an 8-year-old and a Southfield homeowner. He earns $28.75 an hour at American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc.'s Plant 2, which he says works out to an annual salary of roughly $57,000. He's also on strike -- going on one month.

McDonald, like the rest of the 3,650 United Auto Workers members striking five American Axle facilities in Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y., gets a whopping $200 a week in strike pay "when my bills far exceed that," he told me Thursday.

Fearful he may start to miss payments, he says he's talked to his mortgage company and the one that holds his car loan. When will you go back to work, they ask? Don't know. When you do, what will you get paid? Don't know that, either.

McDonald, like thousands of other autoworkers, is caught in a middle that is much less of his own making and more the circumstances of the times and a dramatically different world ill-suited for the rigidity of old Detroit's long labor contracts and bureaucratic inertia.

He's too young to slip into retirement and too smart to think that the heart of American Axle's sprawling network of gear and axle plants can prosper without change. He's made good money since joining the company on Sept. 9, 1996, in retrospect a golden, cosseted age compared to the brutal change of today.

And he, like so many of us regardless of income, has built a life around that take-home pay and the expectations that go with it. "My household cannot withstand a 50 percent pay cut," he says.

Whose could? American Axle, like bankrupt Delphi Corp. and arch-rival Dana Corp. before it, says it needs to pay UAW members about $14 an hour to be competitive -- or it can't compete for new contracts, meaning striking workers would be without work sooner or later.

"I understand that in order to be competitive with other companies you have to bring costs in line," McDonald says. "But they did other things to get there. You don't have to go through bankruptcy to see what's coming. We know what's coming."

And it's scary as hell.

Because McDonald and American Axle are both right. An auto supplier, circa 2008, cannot pay workers a 50 percent premium over its competitors and hope to get new work, no matter how much Chairman Dick Dauch has invested in his plants.

Nor can families who, as President Bill Clinton used to say, "work hard and play by the rules" easily absorb such an economic blow, whatever the cash sweeteners to "soften" their landing over the next few years.

As the Democratic contenders for president trudge across the country mouthing "change" but really not meaning it, except insofar as it pertains to the current occupant of the White House, they might consider visiting the pickets along Holbrook, where the prospect of change is real, harsh and unavoidable.

Change is the prospect of seeing a job paying nearly $29 an hour essentially cut in half, and having the pain salved by a "buydown" of, say, $100,000 pre-tax. Change is knowing a strike has limited utility because the company has more competitive production facilities elsewhere in the United States or Mexico. Change is knowing that some of your co-workers have other options to accepting a pay cut, but most don't.

"In any negotiation, both sides have to negotiate," McDonald says. "Dick Dauch can't get everything. What he should do is give us all a buyout and go get a new work force."

In a state vying each month for the nation's highest unemployment and home foreclosure rates, that wouldn't be as difficult as it may sound -- even at $14 an hour.

But it signals this: Archetypal gilded industrial workers who defined Detroit for three generations are making one of their last stands among the pickets on Holbrook, and folks like McDonald are caught in the crossfire.

Reality? Yes. It's also a sad end to an era whose luster dimmed a long time ago.