From belief to resentment in Indiana

[silvershadow]

From belief to resentment in Indiana

HUNTINGTON, Ind. —Chris Setser worked a 12-hour graveyard shift while his children slept, cleaned the house while they were at school and then went outside to wait for the bus bringing them home. He stood on the porch as he often did and surveyed the life he had built. The lawn was trimmed. The stairs were swept. The weekly family schedule was printed on a chalkboard. A sign near the door read, “A Stable Home Is A Happy Home,” and now a school bus came rolling down a street lined by wide sidewalks and American flags toward a five-bedroom house on the corner lot.

“Right on time,” Setser called out to the driver, waving to his children as they came off the bus.

It had been two months since Setser and 800 others in Huntington were told their manufacturing jobs would soon be outsourced to Mexico, but so far nothing about his routine had changed. He was still making $17 an hour on the third-shift line at United Technologies. The first layoffs wouldn’t take place for a year, maybe more. “We’ll be fine because we’ve always been fine,” Setser had said again and again, to his fiancee, his four children, and most of all to himself, but he was beginning to wonder if the loss of something more foundational in Huntington was underway.

Into the house came 10-year-old Johnathan, who had heard a rumor at school that factory workers would also be moving to Mexico. “No way, bud,” Setser told him. “We’re staying right here.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/from-belief-to-resentment-in-indiana/2016/05/14/d1642222-16fa-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Great read, my dear silvershadow!

Is it any wonder that Trump is doing so well with these workers?

This story should be printed out and mailed to every COO, every CEO, all of them.

Not that it would make any difference.


I'm angry too.


K&R

[silvershadow]

2. Yep. This was posted to FB by a personal life-long friend.

She and her husband finally pulled the plug and moved out of state last year. They aren't coming back. I have my own plans to do the same, well underway.

[alarimer]

3. I read this today and it infuriated me.

What are we going to do?

I'm not sure anyone can bring those jobs back. So what are people supposed to do? The cost of housing is not going down, nor is the cost of anything else. I don't know if anyone, even Bernie, has the answer to this.

And so many here look down on the sorts of people this article talks about. So-called progressives and Democrats who demonize the very people that used to be the core of the party. Well, guess what? When you do that, they won't vote for your candidate.

[Hydra]

4. Guaranteed minimum income

And yes, many people are still being assholes about it...but if we aren't willing to fix the economy, there will never be 100% employment...which means someone and their kids are out there starving.

We have enough food and housing for everyone- those should be basic rights.

[Hydra]

5. A heartbreaking read

Add the shadow of climate change to it...and what we thought our world was is disappearing.

[Igel]

6. That was my neighborhood.

Except the jobs, not the company, moved. In a decade 35k jobs were lost and the entire community vanished. It was replaced by white-collar workers. That was the proud boast made by the president at the time.

This, of course, was the '70s, not now. Carter was the president. And it was considered a good thing, because the rough, polluting jobs would be replaced by high-paid white-collar jobs. That didn't happen. Last video I saw of the company that had been the mainstay of the community was a large polluted expanse. Many hundreds of acres, with a single smallish building that served as the (finally) new owner's HQ. Instead of making steel, it would be a port of entry for large ships bringing in manufactured goods.

The company's demise had a lot of causes. Any profits went to dividends or increased pay. My mother with her high-school degree, the last year she worked ('87? '88?) boasted she grossed over $80k. My father only made $75k. This was nearly 30 years ago, union jobs in a shop that was downsizing and would close a couple of years entirely after their retirement in the late '80s.
By that time the dividends were near zero. The pension fund was paying out on the generations of workers that had retired, but few were paying into it.

The company had a last-ditch hail-mary pass, banking on large low-quality production just as China was coming on line with huge low-quality production and lower costs. The state got involved, and had requirements that had to be met for permitting, as politicians protected their own ... and helped make sure the site was unprofitable. My mother complained it was all going to the executives, so I sat down with the annual report and pulled out the executives' salaries. Then I divided it by the number of employees and the number of hours they worked. Zero out the executives' salaries and the workers would make far less than a dollar more per week. Gross. "They're stealing the money, somehow." She could never say how.

Now we notice, nearly 40 years later, when it matters to us politically.

[Thespian2]

7. This situation did not happen over-night...

It began with the industrial revolution, continued through the robber barons of the 19th century (especially John D. Rockefeller), slowed down for WWII, was briefly taken over by FDR, but came back stronger than ever when RayGun was elected...twice...and the criminal Bush family was dagger to the heart...No one noticed much when the Koch-suckers and their billionaire friends plotted the demise of the American worker...did anyone notice when they began buying local and state elections?...not really...control of the states led to the control of Congress and, of course, control of the federal government...now, don't rock the boat, everything is going according to their plan...

Excellent post, silvershadow...

[silvershadow]

9. Thank you. This state is not the same state I grew up in,

that's for sure. I agree with your assessment as well. I suspect that is why the forces against Bernie are indeed strong. They know. And they are waking up to the fact that we know, too. This election appears to be for all the marbles, and they are used to having them.

[alarimer]

10. NAFTA only made this sort of thing easier

But that genie is not going back in the bottle.

[Hairy Harry Potlover]

8. Indiana

It was settled mostly from the South, not the east. I only learned that recently. Then again, I'm not from that part of the country.

[raccoon]

11. Great article. Lots I'd like to quote, but I'll go with this:

We’re getting to the point where there aren’t really any good options left,” (Chris Setser) said. “The system is broken. Maybe its time to blow it up and start from scratch, like Trump’s been saying.”

“You said it always evens out,” (his daughter) told him.

“Maybe I was wrong,” he said, but now his voice was quiet.

“You said things just have a way of working.”

“Maybe not,” he said, because with each passing day he was seeing it more clearly. The town was losing its best employer, and all around him stability was giving way to uncertainty, to resentment, to anger, to fear.