The article studies the difficult process of normalization of the U.S. automobile employment relationship at a time of industrial crisis and unprecedented intervention of the state in 2009, during the Great Recession. Changes introduced at contractual “boundaries”, understood in generational terms, undermined the single employment norm: lower wage-scales for entry-level workers and a distinct health-care regime for retirees, through a new actor in industrial relations, the VEBA trust fund. It highlights the mounting influence of financial rationale in this process of recodifying employment norms, both in setting wage standards and through the VEBA, as a market-based provider of social benefits and the trust’s role in the state-mandated bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. The tensions that ensued, from the shop floor to workers’ home lives, challenged the union mandate to represent all workers and marked the new sociopolitical compromise reached in 2015 contracts. This short but crucial period created an “employment grey zone”, a theater of confrontations among stakeholders and indeterminations where workers’ individual and collective strategies proved decisive in how events played out.