American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

The fear of being replaced, of no longer being needed, is an anxiety that has only grown with time.

Work matters. Too often, those who champion the working class speak only of social safety nets, not the jobs that anchor a working person’s identity.

But laid-off factory workers like John remember that speech as the day Trump pledged to be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

with street children in Kenya. These steelworkers

Who knows the name of the first female coal miner? The first female autoworker at Ford? How many even know the full name of “Mother Jones,” the fearless labor organizer once labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” because legions of mine workers laid down their picks at her command? (It was Mary Harris Jones.)

Nothing stops a bullet like a job—or so the saying goes.

In that way, 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.

The biggest lesson I took from Wally’s story was how thin and fickle the line between citizen and criminal can be, and how frequently it has to do with how people earn their daily bread.

“That shouldn’t be happening,” John told himself. “This is a union shop.” At Navistar, if a worker had been disciplined for failing to wear safety glasses, all the other workers threw their safety glasses onto the ground in solidarity, an act that halted the whole assembly line.

If a worker complained to him about something the union had done, John replied, “You are the union. Show up to a meeting.”

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.

free-trade agreements eroded the advantage that unions had had at the bargaining table. Throughout the 2000s, unions progressively gave up wages and benefits that they’d previously won.

free trade was being championed by people whose own jobs were not on the line.

It was never a mystery who the winners and losers of free trade would be. Classical economic theory had long predicted that free trade would increase the wealth of the wealthy while making less-educated Americans poorer, a concept referred to as the “distributional effects” of free trade. Free trade threw American factory workers into economic competition with some of the hungriest workers in the world. But it offered untold wealth, market access, and investment opportunities to U.S. corporations.

Supporters of free trade say that it generates enough new wealth to compensate losers. But we don’t do that. The United States spends far less per capita than European countries on compensating and retraining workers who lose their jobs in the wake of free trade agreements.

imports. As late as the 1980s, American economists held lively debates about the cost and benefits of free trade,

When factories moved out of the United States, their CEOs claimed, “That’s just capitalism. That’s the invisible hand.” But when banks failed—as many Mexican banks did after NAFTA and many U.S. banks did in 2008—those same free-market CEOs come begging for a not-so-invisible handout.

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.

Wally’s blackness gave him a certain psychological advantage over the white men who were traumatized by watching their jobs disappear. Black people were more accustomed to adversity, joblessness, and unemployment.

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.

What struck me most as I got to know Jaz was the sheer number of different immigration statuses there are and how one family can encompass them all. Jaz had a temporary work permit. His parents and wife were undocumented. His two sons were citizens, born here. His sister was a DREAMer. His brother was a deportee, sent back to Mexico, where he eventually found a job in a toothbrush factory. Another brother, who’d married an American, had a green card.

“Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit,” wrote George J. Borjas, an economist at Harvard Kennedy School, perhaps the country’s most outspoken academic on the downsides of immigration, in Politico Magazine in 2016. “In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer.”

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.

There are all kinds of good reasons to continue welcoming immigrants, from the desire to attract the world’s best and brightest to the need to replenish our rapidly aging population. But those arguments might find more support among blue-collar Americans if they were accompanied by a more candid acknowledgment of who benefits most from immigration and who takes a hit.

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.

Yet as soon as Trump got into office, he gave rich people jobs, nominating the wealthiest cabinet in history.

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. The danger declines over time, but mortality rates stay measurably higher, even twenty years later.

The more I learned about the labor movement, the more white supremacy looked like a rich man’s trick to convince a poor man to support an economic system that made a beggar of him. How could white workers earn a decent wage when they had to compete with slave labor?

After the initial shock, those of us in the knowledge economy settled into a plague routine that was in many ways an improvement on ordinary life. Instead of grueling commutes and business trips, we went on video calls wearing sweatpants with suit jackets. We gained a new electronic intimacy with our colleagues, showing off dogs and houseplants. After six weeks of lockdown, we vowed to hunker down until the invention of a vaccine.

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.”

It made me wonder what would have happened if instead of paying people to stay idle, we had paid them to work together for the common good. What if they had joined a civilian army of contact tracers, working to defeat the virus? What if they had helped install broadband in rural places, delivering access to knowledge? What if they had built roads and bridges and parks that would serve us for years to come, like the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression?