American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

News that Shannon had been fired and brought back rippled across the factory floor. The first thing that came to John’s mind when he heard it was that she’d gotten her job back because she was a woman. Black workers assumed that it was because she was white.

People always assume non-merit

Our decision at the end of World War II to create a system of global, expanded, freer trade and the supporting institutions played a major role in creating the prosperity of the American middle class. That was true. But he went on to make three specific promises about NAFTA that did not come to pass: Mexicans would become rich enough to buy American products; they’d stop flocking into the United States, looking for work; and NAFTA would create far more American jobs than would be lost.

They also examined voting patterns in free-trade-exposed counties and found that in Republican-held districts, job losses had driven voters even further to the right. Liberals couldn’t understand it. How could places that are increasingly reliant on disability checks and food stamps double down on conservativism? But laid-off factory workers don’t want a government check; they want their jobs.

Throughout the 2000s, unions progressively gave up wages and benefits that they’d previously won. It was a dramatic reversal from the days of Henry Ford, who had paid his workers a high daily wage in order to reduce turnover and the need to train new workers. Fordism, as it came to be called, created a virtuous cycle in which workers earned enough to save up and buy a car, increasing the demand for the company’s products. Free trade with China produced the opposite effect: a Walmart economy in which workers are paid so little that they can’t afford to shop anywhere else.

Yet there was something disturbing about the way that free trade was being championed by people whose own jobs were not on the line. The more I probed, the more I began to see what the steelworkers saw when they heard fancy people on the news talk about the future of the U.S. economy. “Our comparative advantage is our knowledge and capital,” declared the men with the money and the college degrees.

Folk wisdom

To Americans with gumption and capital and education, globalization made big dreams possible. It was more than an economic theory; it was a way of life. Nearly every one of my closest friends had lived or worked overseas for a stint. My social circle teemed with so-called third culture children: born in one country, raised in another, living or working in a third country as adults. I’d attended birthday parties in Italy, France, and Morocco; weddings in Thailand and Switzerland; a reunion of old friends in Cambodia and the Hague.

In 1998, at the height of what has been called “free trade euphoria,” the philosopher Richard Rorty warned in his book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America about the impending fallout from the loss of factory jobs: Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported…. Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Chuck scoffed at that. “They’re not going to do that,” he said flatly. Besides, he asked, why should every worker walk out with the same amount? “You’re telling me that your three years count as much as my forty-eight?” “Yes, I am,” John replied. “What did they take from you? You’ve been there forty-eight years. You can retire. You have your pension. What did they take from me? They took away the ability to retire…. You’ve already had the opportunity. Now you’re saying you want more?” The argument got heated, so heated that Chuck joked later that he’d looked around for something heavy—a tape dispenser or something—to clock John in the head with if the big man grabbed him up.

A union’s power rests on its ability to determine who is trained. Modern labor unions date back more than a thousand years to master craftsmen’s guilds, a kind of mutual aid society. They kept standards as well as wages high by restricting the number of people who could enter a given profession. Such alliances existed all over the world: hunters’ guilds in West Africa, merchants’ guilds in ancient India, blacksmiths’ guilds in feudal Japan.

no division on the factory floor would prove more contentious than the line between those who trained and those who refused. The most militant opponents of training were white men like John, who were active in the union. Training a replacement, in their eyes, constituted a grave moral sin, akin to crossing a picket line.

The most unapologetic volunteers were black men who viewed the refusal to train the Mexicans as racism. After all, it hadn’t been so long ago that the white men had refused to train them. Though some labor unions had participated in the civil rights movement, others had viciously opposed it. Some black workers had never forgotten how poorly the union had treated their fathers. “Unions were created to keep us out,” one told me.

He saw himself as a black man first; steelworker came a distant second.

The white workers I interviewed seemed unaware of what their black co-workers thought about the subject, even their own close friends. Most white workers seemed to avoid discussion of race, aware of the danger of setting off a firestorm. Only a few white workers were known as unapologetic racists.

College-educated people tend to talk about racial justice as the costless extension of basic human dignity, infinitely expandable to all. EQUAL RIGHTS FOR OTHERS DOES NOT MEAN LESS RIGHTS FOR YOU. IT’S NOT PIE., read one familiar sign at a protest rally. But to many workers, racial justice was a code word for who got first dibs on jobs, which are finite and zero sum. “There are only so many jobs in this building,” the union steward had told Uncle Hulan. I also began to see why so many white workers took the closing of the plant harder than their black counterparts did. The black workers had never felt entitled to their jobs in the same way. The loss of the factories had hurt them, too, of course. It had hurt them worse, in fact. But for many black workers, the economic pain of globalization had been tempered by hopeful signs of social progress, including the election of a black man as president. Working-class white men, on the other hand, had seen nothing but losses for three decades. The ebbing away of their position in society hurt. Even American citizenship, among the sole inherited advantages they possessed, seemed to mean nothing to the “degree club,” who sent their jobs to Mexico, China, and other places. Their decline in economic status had not been tempered by social progress. Instead, it had been accompanied by increasingly vocal calls for an end to white privilege. By 2011, working-class whites had been declared “the most pessimistic group in America.”

I saw little evidence that the white steelworkers I followed at Rexnord were any more racist than college-educated professionals on the East Coast. In fact, they lived far more racially integrated lives than the lawyers, investment bankers, and journalists I knew. They labored side by side with blacks and Asians on the assembly lines. They bowled together on Tuesday nights. They went to casinos and Colts games and on fishing trips together. I counted at least two interracial romances on the factory floor. About 40 percent of the workers in the factory were black, according to estimates of people who worked there. The same cannot be said of the corporate boardroom.

The very sight of the Mexicans in the plant drove some of the white men to despair. One got so agitated that he quit and walked away from more than $10,000 in severance pay, simply because he could not stand watching the Mexicans learning his job. “It’s depressing to see that you ain’t got a future,” he told me.

after Shannon started training Keith, she complained that he was always on his phone and didn’t seem to listen to a word she said. She suspected it was because she was a woman. Meanwhile, Keith complained that Shannon wasn’t training him with the same care she had given Terri, who was white. Keith also felt that Shannon got away with things that no black person could. After they clashed at work, Shannon thought about what she’d tell her boss if Keith accused her of racism. “If he plays the black card, I’ll play the woman card,” she said.

Garett Jones - Diversity is a weakness in low-IQ jobs

At the time, the owners of Link-Belt practiced what many called “stakeholder capitalism,” in which a CEO saw his job as balancing the interests of all stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and the government. For much of the twentieth century, premier business schools taught this as the proper conduct of a business leader. But in the 1980s, as global competition heated up, business schools and corporations abandoned that philosophy and embraced “shareholder capitalism,” which preached that a CEO’s sole responsibility was to increase the profit of shareholders. This idea, proselytized by the conservative economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago business school, made it a solemn duty for CEOs to rid themselves of their expensive obligations to the American workers who had long produced their iconic brands.

Nicole had always resented the factory, which took so much of her mother’s time. Nicole wished that her mother worked as a secretary or real estate agent, a “normal mom job,” as her friends’ mothers did. Even now, after all these years, Nicole wasn’t quite sure what a bearing was. “Is it something to do with cars?” she asked after Shannon hung up the phone. That hurt Shannon’s feelings. “Seriously?” Shannon asked. “Bearings are like air. They are in everything that moves.” Nicole did not look convinced.

After Shannon made her decision, she came up with more and more reasons to do it. One: Training would help the Mexican people, who were poorer than she was. “You shouldn’t be a rich person anyway, the Bible says. God would want you to share.”

Mexico had not benefited from NAFTA nearly as much as NAFTA’s architects had promised it would. Some people blamed the treaty for allowing U.S. agribusiness to sell subsidized corn in Mexico, driving more than a million Mexican farmers out of work. The wages of Mexican factory workers had never “converged” with U.S. wages the way experts had predicted.

The friendship with Arromoneo changed how Abraham felt about his job. At first he thought it a good thing to bring the factory to Mexico. “I thought, ‘It’s just part of capitalism, globalization,’ ” Abraham told me. “It’s the regular process of a company trying to lower its costs.” But the friendship made him face “the reality of taking away somebody else’s job.”

Nicole was already the best-educated person in her family. Shannon, Larry, and Bub had all dropped out of high school. Larry had earned his GED the same year he left high school, a point of pride for him. He had passed the test by one point without even studying, a model of efficiency. He often reminded Bub of that feat: “You hear that, Bub?” Bub had dropped out of school years before but still hadn’t earned his GED.

Girls now succeed more than boys

She knew lots of father-and-son pairs at the factory. Why not a mother and son?

Bub would feel emasculated

Whereas the steelworkers’ daughters tended to go into nursing, a job that can’t be moved overseas, many of their sons seemed adrift. Some lived with their parents into late adulthood, playing video games. Others worked in warehouses.

Shannon had heard that time and time again: Mexicans worked for less. That was their main sin. “They do it cheaper,” she told me. “They are a lot better workers. That’s because they don’t have that opportunity where they are from.” To many steelworkers, that fact marked the final broken promise of NAFTA. The treaty had not stopped the flow of illegal immigration; instead, undocumented immigrants had moved in unprecedented numbers to low-cost states that hadn’t seen much Mexican immigration before.

Her new Mexican neighbors knocked on her door and asked if they could host a party. She said sure. The party looked nice. It even had a bouncy house for kids. But they didn’t invite her. She got excited when a Mexican supermarket opened on the corner, replacing Al’s, which had been empty for years. Then she tried to buy a pack of Marlboros there. The cashier couldn’t understand her. She never went back.

Mexicans seen as hard working but don't assimilate

In the black community, skin color can reflect a subtle, pernicious hierarchy, as some white plantation owners who fathered children with slaves gave their progeny education, land, and freedom. Among Latinos, immigration status and time spent in the country often determine the contours of internal class divisions. People’s attitude can change overnight, once they become citizens, Jaz and Jessica told me. Some curse their former friends as “damn Mexicans.”

SHANNON’S UNCLE GARY watched the Mexicans move into Hillbilly Heaven with a mixture of awe and outrage. “They live eight to ten people up in a house,” he told me. “Then they buy another house. They work together as a unit. That’s how they get themselves somewhere. I think that’s great. You ain’t going to get eight poor white people to live together.”

But other studies show that an influx of undocumented immigrants can erode the wages of American workers, particularly those who have only a high school education or less, as well as the wages of other immigrants, with whom the undocumented most directly compete. Immigrants are believed to make up nearly half of all workers in the United States who lack a high school degree.

Black people who were employed as maids, janitors, nannies, and gardeners seemed to be hit the hardest. Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard Kennedy School, found that cities that had seen a 10 percent increase in the number of workers because of immigration had also seen a 4 percent decrease in black workers’ wages, a 3.5 percent decrease in their employment rate, and a .08 percent increase in their incarceration rate. But for well-off Americans who hire labor—the owners of restaurants, golf courses, nursing homes, chicken-processing plants—the arrival of hardworking undocumented immigrants who didn’t belong to unions was a financial boon.

The influx of immigrants boosted the wages of highly educated mothers like me by helping them get back into the workforce, according to a 2007 paper, “Cheap Maids and Nannies,” by the labor economists Patricia Cortés (University of Chicago) and José Tessada. I knew that intimately. The only reason I’d been able to travel to Indianapolis so frequently was because of a wonderful, trustworthy, and affordable au pair from Mexico who’d come over on a cultural exchange program.

In the litany of things that Chuck Jones had predicted that a man would lose when the factory closed—his house, his truck, his wife, then his life—the departure of the wife was the second-to-last blow. It was a rare admission in a factory full of male chauvinists that women were the whole point of everything.

The preacher on television began giving a sermon about work, quoting Colossians 3:23. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” the preacher said. “It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Tony opened a Bible that lay nearby and read the passage for himself. That passage imbued work with a religious significance. It conferred an inherent dignity on work, no matter how lowly. Aimed at the slaves of ancient Rome, it assured them that God noticed their best efforts even if their ungrateful masters didn’t. It must have made life more bearable for American slaves as well. In the endless struggle between labor and capital, slaves were the lowliest of actors, hardly in the fight. It was not just that they lacked capital; they were capital, no better than a plow. Poor whites had only the meager wages they could earn, but slaves lacked even that.

What he meant was that he hadn’t given up on capitalism. Nor had he given up on the United States. He was willing to pay his share of what it cost to keep the country running. But others he knew were not willing. They decamped to tax havens. It was a stark illustration of the threat that globalization posed to the very idea of national identity. It’s not just factories that move abroad these days; U.S. corporations move their headquarters to countries with more favorable tax laws. And increasingly, wealthy Americans themselves shop around for citizenship in other countries. That was part of Donald Trump’s appeal. In a world where wealthy people could be as fickle and mobile as their capital, Trump portrayed himself as a billionaire who was sticking with America. I heard it time and time again from the steelworkers: Trump would do what was best for the country, not just Wall Street.

For the first time in her life, Shannon found herself with nothing to do and money in the bank, a misery she’d never experienced before. With no co-workers to prank, no bosses to please, no bearings to make, she felt disconnected from the world, floating like ash belched out of a furnace. Despite her incredibly good fortune—the mortgage payoff! the screenplay! the promise of a job in Las Vegas!—she sank into a deep depression.

Money can't buy happiness

When wealthy white people buy houses in a black neighborhood, their arrival signifies a change for the better. Home values rise, buoyed by the self-fulfilling prophecy that craft breweries and yoga studios will surely follow. Their simple act of purchasing a home made that house—and every other house around it—worth more. But when a blue-collar black man like Wally bought a house, the social meaning was just the opposite: That neighborhood is still “the ghetto.”

CHUCK JONES, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, had predicted that at least one out of the roughly three hundred laid-off factory workers would die after the factory closed. In the first two years after it closed, I counted three who passed away from stress-related or alcohol-related illnesses. It’s been hard to keep track of the strokes and heart attacks since. That’s the final tragedy of a factory job: after working ten hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, just to get a pension, far too many die before they get to enjoy it. Losing a job can be deadly in ways that researchers are just beginning to understand. Men with high seniority who are laid off die at a rate at least 50 percent higher than that of their peers. The first year out is the deadliest.

Shannon spent $500 on a phone conversation with Allison DuBois, a famous medium who claimed to be able to relay messages from the dead. She absolved Shannon of her guilt more efficiently than any therapist could. “Your mom is in a really good, content place,” she reported. “Everybody’s got to end somehow.”

After countless individual choices over the course of years, their destinies had turned out just as Hollywood screenwriters might have imagined. The white woman depended on the kindness of strangers. The black man died tragically. The white man achieved his dream of buying a house in the suburbs.

Marlon found a tactful way to bring up John’s Confederate flag. “I noticed you had a flag,” he said. “You like that flag?” John replied that his family hailed from Kentucky and the flag had sentimental value to him. The two men left it at that.

The global economy had smiled on me. The child of two PhDs, I had been among the tiny number of black people to make it into Harvard and onto the staff of a famous newspaper. I was black enough to benefit from affirmative action but not so black as to be followed around a department store or pulled over by police for driving a fancy car.

Thanks to the efforts of activists from a previous generation, I had a shelf full of children’s books with black characters for my daughter. But I had yet to find one book about a child growing up in a trailer park.

Slavery ruined the bargaining power of landless whites and consolidated the power of plantation owners, which was why some early white settlers opposed it. In 1860, two-thirds of whites in the South owned no slaves at all; they couldn’t afford to. Yet poor whites provided the cannon fodder of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Meanwhile, rich white men who owned “20 Negroes or more” could be exempted from military service.

Stormy Daniels reminded Shannon of Dirty Butt Tasha, the stripper Bub’s dad had spent money on back when he and Shannon couldn’t even make the rent. To Shannon, Daniels was just another gold digger, trying to shake money out of someone else’s man. Trump’s cheating didn’t put him beyond the pale for Shannon. Men lied and cheated; that’s just what they did. She didn’t like it, but to deny it would be to deny human nature itself. If anything, the soap opera going on in the White House made Trump seem more human and relatable than Barack Obama. No one Shannon knew had a perfect nuclear family like Obama’s.

Low class people do low class things

What if food got scarce? What if we could no longer purchase the quinoa cakes and gorgonzola we needed?

A bookstore owner in Minneapolis whose neighborhood had gone up in flames after George Floyd’s death told me that the destruction hadn’t surprised him: “People are furious and traumatized and unemployed.” Unemployed. That was the difference. Because of the pandemic, tens of millions of people had been out of work, stuck at home looking at their phones when the video of George Floyd’s death hit. After months of social isolation in lockdown, the protests had given jobless people something important to do, a community to do it with, and a sense of common purpose.

Collective effervescence

She prayed for some kind of karmic vengeance. Then one night an ambulance arrived and carried the junkie away. “I hope he’s dead,” Renee said. The van went silent. “Anybody want the radio?” Shannon asked, fooling with the knobs. Fast-forward to 2020. The election loomed. Mike wanted to start protesting at Trump rallies again. But he needed a new rock star. Renee had passed away, he’d heard, from a drug overdose.