American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

In Indiana, Link-Belt’s name adorned a water tower and a fleet of trucks. Working there conveyed a certain status. “You are a member of a great industrial family,” declared an employee handbook from 1955. “The products you help make bear Link-Belt’s Symbol of Quality known throughout the world.” More than half a century later, the building had aged. Its roof leaked brown water onto the machines when it rained. About three hundred people worked on its factory floor, half the number it had been designed to hold. The plant had been bought and sold more times than anyone could count. The workers had been passed from owner to owner, just like the machines they ran. Rexnord, a Milwaukee-based industrial supplier, owned it now. But the workers still took pride in the Link-Belt name, which lived on as a brand, written in proud letters on the cast-iron housings of the most expensive bearings they made.

the bearings were unglamorous, anonymous, hidden from view, like the workers themselves.

One guy said that if he could be anything, if he didn’t have to worry about money, he’d be a farmer. He had farmed before. Another said he’d pump gas at a gas station. A third man said, “Honestly, I’d do nothing at all.” “I’d do hair,” said another.

Lack of intellectual ambition

Terkel managed to pinpoint a chief anxiety of the American working class: “the planned obsolescence of people.” The fear of being replaced, of no longer being needed, is an anxiety that has only grown with time. Millions of Americans are coming of age in places where a majority of the jobs that exist are expected to be outsourced, offshored, or automated in the coming decades. Even the harried fast-food worker at the drive-through window cannot sleep easy at night without fear of being replaced by a robot. This is the final insult of menial, poorly paid work: the CEO will eventually find a way to get rid of it—of you—altogether.

Fear of replacement also applies to populations. Bosses first ship jobs to Mexico, then allow Mexicans in.

The march on Washington in 1963—where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jobs came first, even before freedom. What good was the right to sit at a lunch counter if you couldn’t afford a meal?

Now our country is grappling with a new wave of job displacement brought on by artificial intelligence. A global pandemic has accelerated the trend of humans being replaced by machines that don’t call in sick and don’t have to quarantine. Millions of jobs have disappeared, and millions more will disappear in the future. It’s not clear how the country will cope. Some people have begun to talk about “universal basic income,” a naked admission that a significant portion of the American people no longer fits into the economy.

Like most black people, Wally’s large extended family favored the Democratic Party, the party that had supported the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. But the Halls had much in common with conservatives: they were churchgoers, gun owners, and entrepreneurs, and they knew the cost of nitpicky government regulations. In years past, some in the Hall clan had cast ballots for Indiana’s governor Mitch Daniels, a Republican. Yet the Halls could not abide Donald Trump.

Wally’s refusal to “play the race card,” his work ethic, and his magnetic personality made him popular with both the union and the corporate bosses. Eventually, the union president appointed him to one of the most coveted positions on the factory floor. The job came with an office, a coffeepot, and freedom to roam the factory at will. Only two men had ever held the post, both of them black. The union leaders wanted to boost diversity in their inner circle.

Racial diversity against class division

He also resented the money she spent on shoes. She joined a shopping club called ShoeDazzle, which sent her a new pair of shoes every month for $39. Three sides of the walk-in closet he had built were already filled with shoes: Gucci sandals, stiletto-heeled boots, and blindingly white sneakers, still in the boxes. “Why do you buy so many shoes?” he asked her. “You never even wear them.” She shrugged, as if her shoes were none of his business. “I might,” she replied.

Women be shopping

And so in the spring of 2016, John watched a Democratic debate. He liked what Sanders had to say about factories moving overseas. But he didn’t like what he said about free college for all. “Free this, free that,” John complained to Chuck at the union hall the next day. “Who’s going to pay for that, Chuck? The workingman, that’s who.”

“If a Democrat is in office, old Dad has a job,” John used to tell his kids. “If a Republican gets in there, old Dad is out of work.” They had believed so fervently in the Democratic Party that they weren’t worried when President Bill Clinton signed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which removed import tariffs on products made in Mexico. The third-party candidate H. Ross Perot had warned that the treaty would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving south of the border. But John and Tim hadn’t paid Perot any mind. Clinton was a Democrat who looked after the workingman.

John and Tim railed about the Democratic Party the way men rant against girlfriends who’ve been caught sleeping around. It was the betrayal that hurt the most. The Republicans were no better about free trade. They were worse. But at least the Republicans had never pretended to be faithful to the working class.

Shannon had thought of Dan’s house as a peaceful sanctuary from her own chaotic world. Dan even left her money on the nightstand before he went off to work—a twenty-dollar bill or two—so she could get something to eat or just have money in her pocket. It felt wonderful at first. But eventually she came to think of Dan’s house as a prison. Dan was so particular. The bed had to be made as soon as they woke up. If she turned the water on, even just for a second, he demanded that she wipe the sink out with a towel.

Dan - possible autism?

Wally admired how she stayed calm, even when Fish’s mama

She uses AAVE for Wally

She’d dropped the domestic violence charges against Dan, of course, after he’d thrown her car keys into the frozen creek. What choice did she have? She had nowhere else to live. The state pressed forward with the case anyway. She’d hidden in a closet rather than accept the subpoena summoning her to testify against him in court. That had landed her in jail for a weekend for contempt of court. She ended up serving more time than Dan did for that beating. Faced with the choice between obeying Dan and obeying the law, Shannon obeyed Dan, most of the time.

“You make me feel like less of a man,” he told her. “Like I can’t provide for a family.” To Dan, a working mother was a sign of poverty and shame, public proof that the man of the house couldn’t earn enough on his own.

It was as if she could hear her mother warning her from the grave, “Don’t ever depend on a man.” Her mother, Lynda, used to say that often, even as she placed her faith in men over and over again.

If the guys tried to embarrass her by remarking on her appearance, she’d embarrass them right back: “Damn, boy, you looking good in them jeans.”

Whites using AAVE

Over the years, Shannon got to know the furnaces as intimately as people. If the batch furnace spat flames like the gates of Hell, she knew how to calm it down. If the autoquench—as high maintenance as an aging beauty queen—stopped in midcycle, she knew how to coax it into performing again. “This old bitch has got a mind of her own,” she said. Her favorite furnace was the Tocco, which broke down like a needy boyfriend whenever she left it alone too long. She could tell from the pitch of its whining whether the parts inside were going to turn out right.

She wasn’t even sure she considered herself a feminist, to her teenage daughter’s horror. “Sometimes I think, ‘Where’s my husband at? Where I don’t have to worry about all this in the old-fashioned way?’ ” she told me. “But I’ve never had that. It might be because I’m kind of bullheaded.”

Eventually, I came to see her as a blue-collar feminist in the tradition of Dolly Parton, who had grown up slopping pigs in rural Tennessee and used her looks, talent, and business acumen to create an empire. That feminism felt radically different from the women’s liberation movement I’d grown up with. Feminists who expected Hillary Clinton to sail to victory on the votes of blue-collar women like Shannon focused heavily on breaking glass ceilings in the professional world: the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company (Katharine Graham of the The Washington Post, 1972); the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor, 1981); the first American woman in space (Sally Ride, 1983); the first female secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1997); and of course, the first female nominee for president of a major political party (Hillary Clinton, 2016).

Low-income women, especially black women, have always worked, not out of boredom or existential emptiness but out of necessity. Their struggles, which Rutgers labor history professor Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “the other women’s movement,” garnered far less media coverage.

Popular culture in the 1950s focused on women inside picket fences, not the ones on picket lines.

He worked so hard that people wanted to be paired with him. They wouldn’t have to worry about meeting quota or having to take up someone else’s slack. But his work ethic also attracted insults. Some black workers called him an Uncle Tom behind his back. They shuffled, stoop-backed and subservient, when they said his name.

If Jimmy went to the bathroom four times in one afternoon, Danny would remark that Wally hadn’t gone even once. Danny caught Jimmy in a bathroom stall talking on his cellphone and wrote him a disciplinary ticket. “This is modern-day slavery,” Jimmy declared.

Slave morality

Wally’s childhood home, a stately brick four-bedroom colonial, was filled with elephant tchotchkes that his mother collected and family photos from trips to the Bahamas, thanks to a time-share his parents owned. On the screened-in front porch, reading glasses lay on a Bible or a magazine. “Want to know where white people hide the secrets of success so that black people will never find them?” his father used to quiz his sons. “The newspaper.”

“Don’t let me catch you over there,” Wally’s father warned. Wally’s parents did everything in their power to keep their sons away from that world. They sent them to a private Christian academy that instilled biblical values. When the boys weren’t in school, they were at the Barnes United Methodist Church, where Wally wore the white robes of an acolyte and carried the cross into the sanctuary ahead of the pastor. The only place the Hall boys were allowed to sleep overnight was Uncle Hulan’s house, five blocks away. In the summertime, Wally’s father and Uncle Hulan sent their children down to Georgia to stay with Grandma and Granddaddy Hall. The boys begged to play audiotapes on the drive down. If Wally’s father heard a swear in the music, he ejected the tape and tossed it out the car window. But none of it mattered once Wally hit puberty. For his freshman year of high school, he transferred to a public school. He rode the bus with a girl from the neighborhood. A few months later, she came up pregnant.

Black boys more likely to be lower social class than parents

Work in a shoe store, and girls will hardly give you a second glance. Work on the corner, and grown women sashay by in their tightest outfits, hoping to catch your eye.

Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black men in America were prevented by law, policy, and custom from undertaking all but the most menial tasks. In an irony pointed out by the historian Jacqueline Jones, enslaved black men worked in a wide variety of skilled jobs—from blacksmithing to carpentry—because doing so benefited their white masters. But after Emancipation, their job prospects narrowed. Skilled work and high wages were reserved for white men. Black men worked at Link-Belt from the early 1900s but were relegated to the dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs. Well into the twentieth century, black people were largely barred from operating machines, from tractors to typewriters to cash registers. The jobs black men could find were as ditch diggers, shoe shiners, waiters, chauffeurs. In the early twentieth century, the largest employer of black men was the Pullman Company, which hired former slaves to cater to the needs of wealthy passengers on its sleeping car trains.

getting hired at the factory was a bit like being saved in church. No matter what you had been before—drug dealer, murderer, whore—you shed your old identity and got a new one: steelworker.

That’s why nothing stuck in John’s craw like the phrase “white privilege.” The words implied that his people had been handed a middle-class life simply because they were white. In John’s mind, his people had not been given dignity, leisure time, safe working conditions, or decent wages just because they were white; they had fought for those things—and some of them had died in the fight.

“When I say ‘hillbilly,’ I mean simple,” he told me. “I don’t need a whole lot. I don’t want a whole lot. I just want to survive.”

“The way I see it, there is no politics,” he said. “Whoever has the most money is going to get what they want.”

Shannon felt lucky to have found Larry, so lucky that she spread rumors to keep other women at bay. Other girls bragged about how good their men were in bed. Not Shannon. “What’s it like to date Cartoon Larry?” a woman at the bar asked once. “He’s got nothing going on down there,” Shannon lied. “I’m with him for his attitude.”

Larry and his friend celebrated his narrow escape by drinking beer all afternoon. Then Larry drove home drunk and blew past a police car, which chased him down and arrested him. Prosecutors charged him for assaulting Dan and habitual drunk driving.

Average criminal intelligence

Everybody assumed that Wally and Nicky would get married one day, now that Wally had a good job. They were like the two rings of a bearing. Each spun in its own direction, but they did not come apart.

Brilliant line

THE MORE successful Wally became at the factory, the more pressure he put on Nicky to act more like a traditional wife. Every woman he’d ever loved had been needy in some way, with more bills and children than she knew how to handle. Wally had galloped in, a knight on a white horse. Where other men saw gold diggers, Wally saw damsels in distress. In self-reflective moments, he admitted that he felt more secure with women like that. They wouldn’t leave him. They couldn’t afford to.

Other union leaders cut deals with the company, agreeing to one thing while pushing back on another. John wanted to take every case to trial. His attitude put him, as usual, on the opposite side of his wife, a human resources officer for a healthcare company. When John came home complaining about the outrageous things the bosses had done that day, like firing a man for dozing off at his machine, sometimes Nina found it hard to sympathize.

John fought for his black union brothers and sisters just as doggedly as he fought for his white ones. To John, the world wasn’t divided between black and white but between capital and labor. There were two kinds of people: the greedy bosses who ran the company and the workers they oppressed. “Company” was an adjective, and not a complimentary one. Whenever his wife argued too strongly from a boss’s point of view, he would lob a bitter insult at her: “You’re just company.”

“She’s always been company,” John grumbled. “She always argues with me. We never see eye to eye. She’s a hard-core liberal.”

SIGMUND FREUD, the father of psychoanalysis, is said to have been asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well. His response reportedly was “Lieben und arbeiten”—to love and to work. The link between the two—or rather, between marriage and jobs—has long been studied by researchers, who have examined everything from marriage rates during steel-manufacturing booms and busts to the percentage of children born out of wedlock in places that had lost jobs because of the flood of cheap imports from China. They found the same thing: the availability of well-paid jobs boosted the incidence of marriage for men.

The decline in income and employment opportunities for working-class men brought about by globalization has been largely offset by their wives going to work. The median household income continued to rise long after men’s wages stagnated, only because women entered the workforce. Eventually, the median household income began flattening out. But increasingly, two paychecks are needed to maintain a middle-class life.

Cracker Barrel had come to symbolize the divide in the country, after a political analyst pointed out that Barack Obama had won only 29 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel but 77 percent of counties with a Whole Foods.

Despite their differences, Shannon, Wally, and John had a lot in common that they didn’t have in common with me: They were grandparents in their forties. (I gave birth to my daughter at forty-two.) They smoked or chewed some form of tobacco. (No one in my social circle did.) John and Wally were both proud gun owners, like the men in Shannon’s life. (I didn’t know a single person in Cambridge who owned a gun that shot anything but glue.) They lived within miles of Indianapolis, the city where they were born, and saw their siblings, their adult children, and their parents regularly. (I lived far from where I grew up and saw my parents and my sister only a few times a year.) If their car or kitchen sink broke down, they tried fixing it themselves, using tips gleaned from YouTube. (I once hired an electrician to fix a broken light, only to be told that it just needed a new bulb.) Wally and John drove American trucks: Fords and Chevys. (In my life, I’ve owned a Honda, a Hyundai, and a Volkswagen.) They all had friends or family members who had served in the military. (No one I spoke to on a daily basis had ever put on the uniform.) Perhaps most crucial of all was that although they’d all taken community college classes after high school—John had an associate’s degree—none had graduated from a four-year college. (Nearly everyone in my immediate circle of family and friends had not only a bachelor’s degree but a master’s degree, PhD, JD, or MD.)

It’s easy to feel that advanced degrees are “normal” when everyone around you has one, but in fact, just 13 percent of American adults do. Yet people with those credentials make almost all of the big decisions in the country. If college degree holders were a tribe, we would control almost everything: nearly every seat in Congress, every Supreme Court ruling, every White House since 1953, every Fortune 500 company, every trade delegation, every editorial board. Is it any wonder that we have done pretty well over the last twenty or thirty years? During the era of globalization, the median family net worth of college graduates rose from around $238,000 in 1989 to $291,000 in 2016, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Meanwhile, people without college degrees have seen their net worth decline. It hasn’t always been this way. In the 1960s, about a quarter of the members of Congress did not hold a college degree. But since 2000, people who haven’t graduated from college have been “virtually absent from elective office” in the United States and much of Europe,

instead of grappling with the vast inequalities created by globalization, the United States’ leaders focused on expanding access to a college education. That created a class of credentialed professionals who feel entitled to rule even as they are increasingly divorced from the economic realities of ordinary people. Thomas Frank made a similar argument in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, which described how the Democratic Party had deliberately chosen to switch allegiances from labor unions to the professional class in the 1970s. “The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be,” Frank told In These Times in 2016 after his book came out. “With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.” In an interview with me, he said, “It’s incredibly satisfying to be part of this elite. Not only are you economically elite, the crème of the American meritocracy, but you are morally elite. The elites in the nineteenth century had a moral cloud hanging over them. Today’s elite doesn’t feel that way.”

“The world will look more like Downton Abbey, with people having all kinds of servants,” he explained, as if he were merely predicting rain. The jobs of the future that he talked about didn’t strike me as jobs that paid very much or came with any long-term job security. They didn’t seem to have the structure, benefits, or sense of community that Shannon craved. Nor did they seem to be evenly distributed across the country. But he was right, of course. It was already happening. The manufacturing economy had faded into the “service economy.” Four out of five American jobs in the private sector were classified as service jobs.

That was part of the appeal of Donald Trump. He’d grown up watching his father, a bigwig, shake hands with men in hard hats on construction sites. He knew the power of handshakes like that. Trump didn’t talk like a college boy. He cursed. He bragged. He threatened. He mispronounced words. He told tall tales that no one believed. He ate hamburgers, not sushi and salad. And he fought every slight. The college educated didn’t know what to make of him. But factory workers recognized him right away: Trump was a hillbilly in a suit.

On my third trip to Indianapolis, I broke down and ate at Bluebeard by myself.

The China parts offended the workers, who took pride in the Link-Belt name. Sometimes the outsourced parts caused problems because an order could not be filled without a component that was sitting on a ship in the ocean. A plant manager once bellowed at his underlings, “I don’t care how much it costs. I want that part off that boat, and I want it now.”