After the Factory Closes

Farah Stockman – who won the Pulitzer Prize as a Boston Globe reporter in 2016 and joined The New York Times editorial board in 2020 – tracked the final days of the Link-Belt manufacturing plant in Indianapolis. Its workers were committed to being union members, though many were politically right leaning voters. Who are these workers and how did they cope after the factory shut down?

The Link-Belt Factory

Stockman centers her book around the Link-Belt factory, owned by Rexnord, which began manufacturing world-class steel bearings in Indianapolis in 1959 and employed generations of local workers until it closed in November 2017.

Author Farah Stockman, then a reporter, met extensively with Link-Belt workers and learned about their lives, politics, and reactions to the plant’s closure. She found that they embodied the American struggle for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights.

Only three out of ten American adults have a four year college degree. Globalization and free trade have benefits for Americans, but those benefits accrue to those educated voters, not to most blue-collar workers. Job loss shifts voters to the political right.

The pandemic revealed that 40% of US workers hold low paying jobs with minimal employment security. Stockman finds that free trade and immigration led to lower wages for blue-collar workers and free trade also weakened their unions. In the 1950s, one-third of American workers were union members; by 2016, only one in eight belonged to a union.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened doors for Black workers, but before a second generation could benefit, factory jobs dwindled as employers sent jobs  offshore. In Indiana, significant factory closures hit in the 1980s.  

Take Wally Hall, who ended up spending tens of thousands of dollars to respond to a medical emergency. He initially sought a job at Link-Belt to obtain health insurance. His uncle Hulan worked as a janitor there until 1964 when he became the first Black worker on the factory floor. His assigned job trainer refused to help Hulan, but he rose to foreman despite his racist co-workers.

Hall, who became a father as a teenager, dealt drugs to provide for his family. He earned a reputation for honesty while dealing. He even tithed to his church from his drug income. The older generation of his family objected to Hall’s lifestyle during that time, but they did not abandon him.

Once he joined Link-Belt, Stockman reports, Hall studied business books so he could perform his $25-an-hour job more effectively. Co-workers admired his work ethic.

You better save all you got. There’s no telling what will happen.Wally Hall

Hall involved his family in launching a new business, “Wally Gator’s Wood Fired BBQ.” In July 2017, when he learned the factory was closing, Hall left.With only his BBQ shop, but not his union job, Hall had no health insurance. That made him reluctant to go to the emergency room when he fell ill. Doctors found “100% blockage in his heart,” and he died at age 43.

China and Mexico

Demand for ball bearings grew after World War II, and the United States dominated the market. But after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, “subsidized steel” flooded the American market.

The low quality of Chinese imports shocked Link-Belt’s workers. Management lowered quality guidelines so it could use substandard Chinese parts. When Link-Belt workers noticed that some shipments were going straight to the company’s warehouses, not directly to customers, they feared this stockpiling foretold the closing of the factory.

Who we hire, who we train, whose mistakes we cover up at work reveal our deepest loyalties.Farah Stockman

Management announced the plant’s closure, dismantled its machines, and shipped them to its new location in Monterrey, Mexico. Mexican workers had to learn how to operate them. Management demanded that former Link-Belt workers train their Mexican replacements or lose their severance packages.

Stockman points to the example of Shannon Mulcahy, who worked at Link-Belt for 17 years, first as a cleaner, and then as a secretary until she moved to the factory floor where she could earn overtime pay. The $25 an hour job provided Mulcahy’s house, car, and sense of self-worth. She cared for her disabled granddaughter and tried to help her daughter attend college. After the factory shut down, Mulcahy found a new purpose in protesting at factory closings and rallies for Donald Trump.

Equality

Link-Belt workers regarded their skills as almost sacred. They felt management did not value their skills and, showing further disrespect, expected them to give their hard-earned know-how away to their Mexican replacements. Some Black workers trained Mexicans because they remembered white workers’ reluctance to train them. They felt it would be racist to refuse to train the Mexicans. 

 Some colleagues understood; many did not and criticized her.

The company’s new Mexican employees found Link-Belt’s Black workers more helpful than its white workers. The Mexicans felt guilty about taking the American workers’ jobs, but they realized that they, too, could be laid off any minute.  Mulcahy trained Mexican workers the way she’d been trained, with care. She was horrified to learn that Mexican trainees would make only $6 an hour in Monterrey.

Stockman got to know Link-Belt worker John Feltner, who didn’t believe in college but made sacrifices to support his daughter’s drive to get a degree. A self-described “hillbilly,” Feltner had family ties to the men who went on strike with the United Mine Workers in the 1930s in the renowned, bloody strike in Harlan County, Kentucky . He would never cross a picket line. 

When Feltner left the Link-Belt factory in June 2017, he had to counter rumors he was going to Mexico to train workers. Mulcahy planted those rumors because she resented the backlash she incurred when she trained her Mexican replacement.

Jobs lie at the heart of the social contract between citizens and their leaders.Farah Stockman

When the Indianapolis factory closed, Feltner was vice president of its union. Later, he campaigned against Democrats even though he’d been a lifelong member of the party. He feared a Hillary Clinton presidency would send more jobs offshore. A postelection analysis by an MIT economist found that imports from China cost Clinton the 2016 election. 

Feltner bounced from job to job and came to believe that his former union activities were a red flag to potential employers. Instead of factory work, he got a job in maintenance at a local hospital, and, within a couple of years, he and his wife were back on their feet. Most of the workers laid off from Link-Belt found new jobs but at less than half the factory’s hourly pay rate.

Some white workers had rooted their identities in the factory and the union. Most became Trump supporters. Few used their retraining benefits from Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA).Regardless of race, workers at Link-Belt ultimately achieved bitter equality: They all lost their jobs.

The devastation of job loss

Farah Stockman is a diligent, evocative journalist. Her encapsulation of the decline of United States manufacturing jobs focuses with detail and empathy on workers’ lives. She depicts them as embodying the impacts of educational, racial, and economic disparities. Stockman’s moving 2017 chronicle reveals the social, monetary, racial, nationalist, and political ramifications of the loss of skilled, blue-collar jobs in America. Without ever mounting a soapbox, Stockman details the emotional, physical, and economic devastation caused by job loss through her sensitive portraits of the lives, thoughts, and voices of blue-collar workers left stranded by factory closings.