[CTC] Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her. Then Her Job Moved to Mexico.

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Becoming a Steelworker
Liberated Her. Then Her
Job Moved to Mexico.
Leer en español  <https://www.nytimes.com/es/2017/10/15/mexico-sindicatos-trabajos-rexnord/>
Written by FARAH STOCKMAN; <https://www.nytimes.com/by/farah-stockman> Photographs by ALYSSA SCHUKAROCT. 14, 2017
INDIANAPOLIS — The man from Mexico followed a manager through the factory floor, past whirring exhaust fans, beeping forklifts, and drilling machines that whined against steel. Workers in safety glasses looked up and stared. Others looked away. Shannon Mulcahy felt her stomach lurch.

It was December 2016. The Rexnord Corporation’s factory still churned out bearings as it always had. Trucks still dropped off steel pipes at the loading dock. Bill Stinnett, a die-hard Indiana Pacers fan, still cut them into pieces. The pieces still went to the “turning” department, where they were honed into rings as small as a bracelet or as big as a basketball. Then to “heat treat,” where Shannon — who loves heavy metal music and abandoned dogs — hardened them with fire. Then to “grinding,” where Shannon’s cousin Lorry Mannix smoothed out any imperfections. And then to “assembly,” where Mark Elliott, a former Marine, joined two rings together, one inside the other, with a wheel of spinning rollers in between. The whole contraption was encased in a cast-iron housing machined by John Feltner, a father of three who’d just recovered from bankruptcy.

The bearings they made — modern-day equivalents of a gadget designed by Leonardo da Vinci — were packed into crates like enormous Christmas ornaments and shipped around the world. To digging machines that claw the earth. To wheat combines that spin in the fields. To elevators and escalators in the cities.

Sometimes a bearing was rumored to have ended up in something notable — the retracting roof of the Dallas Cowboys football stadium or a nuclear submarine — giving the workers a feeling of greatness. But mostly, the bearings were unglamorous. Anonymous. Hidden from view. Like the workers themselves, they were rarely thought of beyond the factory walls.

That was fine with Shannon Mulcahy.

When she first started working at the plant, at age 25, her only goal was to break free of a boyfriend who beat her. Back then, her frosted blond hair and hourglass figure turned heads on the factory floor. Now, at 43, men more often remarked on her broad shoulders, which can lift a 75-pound tray of steel. Or her hands, stained with oil.

"Now, at 43, men more often remarked on her broad shoulders, which can lift a 75-pound tray of steel. Or her hands, stained with oil."No...

“My moneymakers,” Shannon called them.

Being a female steelworker hadn’t been easy. But she’d learned to hold her own. If a man spread a false rumor that he’d slept with her, she spread a false rumor right back that he’d been terrible in bed. If a woman wanted to fight, she learned to say “this is a place of business” instead of brawling then and there.

Shannon worked second shift — 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. — which made it difficult for her to get custody of her daughter or keep her son in check during his teenage years.

But the factory anchored her otherwise tumultuous life. Men had come and gone. Houses had been bought and lost. But the job had always been there. For 17 years. Until now.

Shannon and her co-workers had gotten the news back in October: The factory was closing. Ball bearings would move to a new plant in Monterrey, Mexico. Roller bearings would go to McAllen, Tex. About 300 workers would lose their jobs.

The bosses called it “a business decision.”

To Shannon, it felt like a backhand across the face.

Her boyfriend tried to console her. “We’re survivors,” he told her. “We’ll get by.”

Shannon’s daughter, Nicole Wynne, was not so sure. A high school senior, she had dreamed of being the first in her family to go to college. Figuring out how to pay for it kept her up at night. This news made her worry even more.

And Shannon’s 23-year-old son, Kent Roberts Jr. — known as Bub — depended on Shannon to help support his disabled 4-year-old daughter, who had just barely survived a litany of major surgeries.

“Oh my God, Mom,” Nicole said. “What are you going to do?”

Shannon had no idea. She wished the new factory in Mexico would burn to the ground. She cried that night. And the next night. And the next.

Then, that Monday, Shannon did the only thing she knew how. She put on her electric-blue eyeliner and went back to work.

Halcyon Days and Stormy Months

For months, Shannon kept working as the factory shut down around her. She struggled with straightforward questions: Should she train workers from Mexico for extra pay or refuse? Should she go back to school or find a new job, no matter what it paid?

And she was forced to confront a more sweeping question that nags at many of the 67 percent of adults in this country who do not have a four-year college degree: What does my future look like in the new American economy?

The 410,000-square-foot bearings plant, with its blue and gray tinted windows and flagpole out front, had been built by a company called Link-Belt in 1959, halcyon days for American manufacturing.

Link-Belt meant to bearings what Cadillac meant to cars. “Symbol of quality” was its motto. Even after a series of sales and mergers in the 1980s left the factory in the hands of Rexnord, a Milwaukee-based rival, the Link-Belt brand lived on, stamped into the housings of new bearings.

But over the years, cheaper bearings from overseas eroded profits. To stay profitable, the factory replaced some workers with machines and outsourced some components. Then Rexnord’s chief executive announced the plan to send jobs to Mexico, which he said would reduce costs by $30 million and produce higher returns for investors.


Union representatives drew up a list of concessions in a bid to save the plant. But no concession could change the math. In Indiana, workers earned an average of $25 an hour, plus benefits. In Monterrey, they earned less than $6 an hour.

Moving the factory made sense to the people with college degrees. They expected that old workers could be swapped out for new ones, like interchangeable parts. That trainees could learn in a few weeks what Indianapolis workers had spent years mastering. That workers who had devoted their entire lives to building bearings they boasted were the best in the world would train their replacements and move on.

But it didn’t happen that way.

Rexnord had announced that the factory would close in six months. It took nearly a year. The company, which declined to comment for this article, struggled with setbacks, sabotage and bad publicity that turned the factory into a symbol of national angst at the loss of blue-collar jobs.

The factory’s demise, which mirrored that of so many other American factories, had pierced the national consciousness because of a tweet.

“Rexnord of Indianapolis is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers,” Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, wrote in December. “No more!”

Two weeks later, a letter from Todd Adams, Rexnord’s chief executive, appeared on the factory bulletin board. “Despite the political rhetoric,” Mr. Adams wrote, “our US operations are home to approximately 4,000 associates — more than half of our global workforce.” Rexnord’s associates, he wrote, “are talented and valued.”

Someone drew a hand on the letter, middle finger pointing up.

Like many workers, Shannon held out hope that Mr. Trump would save the factory, especially after he had announced that he saved some jobs at Carrier, a plant a mile away. After Mr. Trump tweeted a threat to tax Rexnord “big” for moving across the border, Shannon tweeted back: “Go PRESIDENT TRUMP!”

Shannon didn’t vote in the election. She considered politicians to be liars. But she found herself rooting for Mr. Trump. Democrats talked about social safety nets, but he talked about jobs.

“I don’t look down on anybody who uses food stamps,” she said. “But I want to work for a living.”

She had always been proud of her job. When she ran into friends from high school, she told them she worked at Link-Belt, conscious of the envy it incited. Shannon was a legacy hire. Her uncle had worked at the factory since before she was born. Her sense of self-worth was tied to the brand. The bearings she built were top of the line.

She held onto that. “I still care,” she said last March. “I don’t know why. It becomes an identity. A part of you.”

For workers like Shannon, the factory’s final months were a time of reinvention and retribution. Of praying that Donald Trump would save them and arguing about why he didn’t. Of squabbling over whether to train their Mexican replacements or shun them. Of vowing that one day, the corporate bosses would realize that making bearings isn’t as easy as they thought.

‘It Makes Me Feel a Little Important’

The first day Shannon set foot in “heat treat” back in 2005, the guys working there instructed her to turn a valve and open a door on a furnace. Boom. A ball of fire leapt out. She screamed. They laughed.

“Heat treat is not for a woman,” one declared.

Shannon thought about returning to her job on the factory’s assembly line, where other women worked. But heat treat was practically a skilled trade. Opportunities like that were rare, especially for a single mother who had dropped out of high school.

Besides, Shannon hadn’t been raised to pay much attention to rules about what a woman should or shouldn’t do. Her own mother drank Wild Turkey and brawled with neighbors. Shannon’s parents married when they were teenagers. Her father got a union job at Wonder Bread. He expected his uniform ironed and his eggs cooked over easy every morning. Shannon’s mother, who kept breaking the yolks, once turned a plate over on his head.

Eventually, her parents divorced and her mother got a job cleaning hotel rooms. She made ends meet with food stamps, and drove a blue Ford Zephyr with no muffler or driver’s side window. She thought she got lucky when she married a truck driver who lived in a trailer near theirs. He moved them to a real house in a quiet town where Shannon became a cheerleader and got interested in school.

But then the truck driver started sneaking into Shannon’s bedroom at night. He went to prison. Without his paycheck, they lost the house.

“Don’t ever depend on a man,” her mother warned.

Shannon never forgot that advice, but life had a way of intruding. Her mother died young from a heart problem, leaving 19-year-old Shannon to care for two little brothers and a baby boy of her own. She looked around for a savior. She thought she’d found one in Dan Wynne, who worked at a backhoe company and drove a nice truck, candy-apple red.

They’d met at a tattoo parlor when she was in her early 20s. He was the first man to take Shannon out to dinner.

“I thought, ‘O.K., what’s it going to hurt?’” she recalled.

But Dan was domineering and had a violent temper. Once, he grabbed her by the throat and banged her head against the floor, according to court records in a trial where he was found guilty of battery. Another time, he threw her car keys into a freezing ravine. After their daughter was born, Dan didn’t want Shannon working, especially at a factory full of men.

The first night Shannon came home from work, Dan threw her belongings into the yard. For years, they had a tumultuous relationship, accusing each other of battery, according to court records.

Her job became her liberator. She worked her way up from a janitor to a heat treat operator, earning $25 an hour. With money like that, she wasn’t going to let anybody drive her away from it.

She found a mentor in Stan Settles, who had worked at the factory for nearly half a century and knew everything about a forest-green heat-induction machine stamped with the word “DANGER” on its side. Its nickname was the “Tocco,” after the Ohio Crankshaft Company that created it.

Stan showed Shannon how to bolt the right size coil to the Tocco’s cabinet and make it heat up like a car cigarette lighter. He showed her how to make the machine spin the steel rings inside the hot coil for just the right amount of time and spit water onto them at the right moment, freezing a new molecular structure in place.

Shannon learned to look at a scrap of steel under a microscope in the factory’s laboratory, to make sure the heat had done its work.

Good steel looks like buckshot, Stan told her. That kind of steel could withstand the weight of a Ferris wheel or the openings and closings of a drawbridge. Bad steel looked like snowflakes. It could splinter inside a customer’s machine.

Always check the sample under the microscope, Stan warned. It was a sacred rule passed down from the workers who had come before him, key to the quality of a Link-Belt bearing, upon which all else was built.

Over the years, Shannon got to know the furnaces as intimately as people. The auto-quench, with its yellow metal stairs, could be as high maintenance as an aging beauty queen. The batch furnace could belch fire out of its chimney, like an ill-tempered whiskey drinker. The Tocco, her favorite, broke down like a needy boyfriend whenever she left it alone too long.

Shannon had a reputation for taking too many smoke breaks and for putting on mascara in the lab. But she knew the furnaces better than almost anybody.

She didn’t mind getting calls from other workers asking her to troubleshoot problems.

“It makes me feel a little important,” she said.

Stan swore that he would never retire. A few years ago, Shannon found him behind the furnaces, straining to breathe. He begged her not to tell the factory’s nurse, but she did.

“I’ll never forgive myself if you die here,” she told him.

He died months later. Shannon became the veteran of the department, the one whom the bosses turned to when new operators needed to be trained.

Still, she wasn’t prepared for the latest request from Rexnord: Would she teach the workers from Mexico being hired to replace her?

Divisions on the Factory Floor

Autumn faded into winter. Graffiti appeared in a men’s bathroom at the factory: “Build the wall” and “Go back to Mexico!”

For years, Shannon had heard complaints that Mexicans were “taking our jobs” and that undocumented immigrants were driving down wages.

As more and more Indianapolis factories moved to Mexico, more and more Mexicans settled in Indianapolis. An estimated 30,000 people born in Mexico lived in Marion County, where Indianapolis is located, in 2015, more than twice as many as in 2000, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Just blocks from the union hall of United Steelworkers Local 1999, a neighborhood once nicknamed “Hillbilly Heaven” was now known as “Little Mexico.” Nearly every business along a busy stretch of road advertised in Spanish. Immigrants worked in lawn care, roofing, house painting — jobs that threw them into competition with unskilled American workers reeling from the loss of factory work.

Shannon once rented a house in Little Mexico, down the street from a place that sold $4 burritos as big as a forearm. She felt strange sitting among customers bantering in Spanish. But she was curious about the country. Her father’s most recent wife had been born there.

“They are a lot better workers,” Shannon said, “because they don’t have that opportunity where they are from.”

At the Rexnord factory, the first trainees arrived around Christmastime.

John Feltner watched them from his machine. Everyone within earshot knew he’d refused to train them.

“I won’t sell my soul for an extra $4 an hour,” he said. “That’s less than a pack of cigarettes.”

John, the unit vice president of the union, had come from a long line of union men. His grandfather was a Kentucky strip miner, his father a millwright at Wonder Bread. He had harsh words for those who volunteered to train: “It’s no different than crossing the picket line.”

Over in assembly, Mark Elliott welcomed the trainees with a booming voice. Mark’s father, a machinist at Detroit Diesel-Allison, hadn’t talked about the union.

Mark volunteered to train the new hires as soon as Rexnord announced the move. Those who did the training in Mexico would get a $5,000 bonus.

“I’m going to get that money,” he said. “I can’t stop it from closing. All I can do is ride the wave on out.”

At rallies, John urged his union brothers and sisters to unite against the company: “Come together and fight for your livelihood.”

But the crisis laid their differences bare.

At a factory where black and white workers bowled together on Tuesday nights, where at least two romances crossed racial lines, a subtle divide emerged: Many white men like John refused to train and shunned those who did; many black men like Mark openly volunteered.

The white workers who did agree to train tended to do so quietly, and kept it a secret as long as they could, said Jim Swain, Shannon’s supervisor.

Some white men complained that they’d watched their economic prospects decline for decades. They had shared their jobs with black men, then with women. Now that blacks and women were welcomed in every facet of factory life, the jobs were moving to Mexico. It seemed like proof that their best days were behind them.

One worker, Bill Jones, quit abruptly, walking away from more than $10,000 in severance because he could not stand seeing the Mexican trainees. “It’s depressing,” he said, “being reminded every day that you ain’t got a future.”

Many of the black workers talked about the factory’s closing as an opportunity to go back to school or start a business. Their attitudes mirrored national polls that showed blacks to be more optimistic about the future. For them, the days ahead had little chance of being as bad as the past. Even those who declined to train refused to bad-mouth the Mexican workers.

“It ain’t their fault,” Mark said.

Many of the women felt torn between the two viewpoints. Shannon, who is white, felt bitter about losing her job but needed the money. Groups of women — black and white — agreed to train together.

When the Mexican trainees arrived, Shannon stood near her red toolbox, which was decorated with photos of her granddaughter, Carmella. The girl had lain in a coma for months, after a string of complications from a rare chromosomal disorder. Shannon had taken off work to stay by her side. The little girl’s fingers had turned black, like too-ripe bananas, from lack of circulation. Doctors snipped them off. Shannon cleaned and dressed the wounds.

Now Carmella slept in a little bed in Shannon’s living room. Every night, when Shannon came home from the factory, Carmella flapped her arms, eager for a hug.

Now that Shannon was losing her job, she needed that $5,000 bonus to keep a roof over the child’s head.

“I have to do it,” she told her daughter, Nicole.

Once she made up her mind, she came up with reasons it was right to train them. It would help the Mexican people, who were poorer than her: “God would want you to share.”

She wanted a passport and the chance to see Mexico on the company’s dime: “I’d never get to do this otherwise.”

She wanted to make sure the Tocco’s new operators cared for it properly: “It just gives me a little bit of closure with the Tocco. I know it sounds crazy. I feel like it’s mine.”

Shannon looked up Monterrey on the internet. She saw a big city, surrounded by mountains. It looked nothing like the dirt roads she’d imagined. She was surprised by how many of Rexnord’s suppliers and competitors were already there.

“That’s the future of manufacturing,” she said. “Of everything, it seems like.”

She wanted to be a part of the future, if only for a few weeks.

After word got out that she had decided to train, one co-worker refused to look at her. Shannon soldiered on, as though she didn’t mind.

She worried more about Bob Osborne, a furnace maintenance man. Bob had been one of the few employees to visit Carmella in the hospital. He had collected more than $900 from co-workers to help her family. After Shannon agreed to train, Bob took her aside and told her that he didn’t want any part of it. Nothing against the Mexicans, he said. He just didn’t want to help Todd Adams carry out his plan.

“If you are working on that Tocco, training, and it goes down, I’m not going to come over and fix it,” he warned.

But Bob didn’t give Shannon the silent treatment. He still joked with her, and asked about Carmella. He criticized other trainers, but not her. “Your situation is different,” he said.

The first day Shannon trained, someone turned a valve on the Tocco when she wasn’t looking. Water overflowed everywhere. The second time, the Tocco’s computerized brain stopped communicating with its mechanical parts. Even the electrician couldn’t fix it. After the day had been wasted, Shannon noticed a wire had been disconnected.

A motherly anger welled up in her chest: Who would attack a defenseless machine? All around her, the factory beeped and whirred, as if life continued as normal. But nothing was normal. A lurking resentment had made itself known.

16 Ricardos for One Shannon

Winter bloomed into spring. The plant was hollowed out, piece by piece. They took Lorry’s grinder. Then Mark’s assembly cell. Then John’s machine. The emptiness in the factory grew.

“Have you been down to see what it looks like?” Shannon’s co-workers kept asking her.

She hadn’t, unable to bear the sight.

Shannon and her co-workers still talked about how to save the factory. Some blamed shareholders for its closing. Shannon thought that maybe if she wrote them a letter, she could change their minds.

“It’s not like they are losing money,” she reasoned. “Why would you take jobs from your people? The American people?”

One day, she searched the internet for shareholders’ names.

Long ago, 40 percent of Link-Belt’s stock was owned by its employees, according to a company document from 1925. Back then, business schools taught that a chief executive’s role was to balance shareholders’ interests with those of employees, customers and the government.

But today, most of Rexnord’s shares are held by mutual funds managed on behalf of global investors. To many, Rexnord was nothing more than three letters on a page — RXN — with an arrow pointing up or down.

In today’s model, chief executives like Mr. Adams get more compensation in stock, to align their interests with shareholders, who are now considered more important than other stakeholders. That’s why Mr. Adams made more than $40 million over the last six years, as he cut the cost of labor.

Shannon never found a list of Rexnord’s shareholders. They remained a mystery, as anonymous as they were omnipotent.

Shannon still tended the furnaces each night, pretending that President Trump would still save their jobs.

But reality became harder to ignore when two men from Mexico arrived to learn about the Tocco.

Shannon knew she’d feel jealous of the men who would take it away. But she found them both likable. They showed her more respect than some Americans she had trained.

The younger one, a maintenance worker named Tadeo, exuded excitement that clashed with the sullen stares he got from American workers in the plant. The older one, a process engineer named Ricardo Valdez, was handsome, carried himself with confidence and liked to crack jokes. “You’re strong!” he told Shannon, flexing his arms. (Ricardo did not return multiple calls and emails.)

One afternoon, she brought Ricardo into the lab and showed him their system for checking samples under the microscope. He glanced around, like a man searching for clues, Shannon recalled.

“Why aren’t you moving down with the factory?” he asked.

“They didn’t offer for us to come down,” she replied.

Ricardo’s eyes widened. Shannon got the impression that he had never been told that the Mexican workers were taking their American trainers’ jobs.

“So they are just leaving you?”

Shannon nodded. “How much are they paying you?” she asked him. “They pay me a lot.”

She pulled her pay stub up on the computer.

“You’re rich!” he told Shannon.

“I’m not rich, honey,” she replied. “I’ve got bills to pay.”

Her mortgage: $1,300. Her car payment: $400. Diapers and medicine for Carmella. Taxes. Shannon’s paychecks disappeared quickly.

She admits that she’s no good at saving. She doles out money without hesitation to those in need. A dollar for the man by the side of the road. Nicole’s car payment. A $1,200 surgery for a pit bull she’d adopted that had swallowed steel wool.

Ricardo pecked at a calculator.

“Sixteen,” he announced. Rexnord could pay 16 Ricardos for the cost of one Shannon.

“But you don’t understand,” Shannon said. “They have the money. They just don’t want to give it to you.”

Shannon felt closer to the younger trainee, Tadeo. (His last name has been withheld due to his concerns about future job prospects.) He was 23, the same age as her son. Shannon called him “Tad” or “Kid.” He had a sparse goatee, and a habit of saying “yes, yes,” even when Shannon wasn’t sure he had understood.

Shannon never left him alone in the factory. He trailed behind her like a duckling when she went outside to smoke.

“Want some chips?” she’d ask him. “What kind of music do you like?”

He brought her cookies and showed her a video on his phone of his girlfriend receiving flowers he’d sent for her birthday.

Once, Shannon mentioned how long it took her to drive to work.

“You own a car?” he asked.

“You don’t?” she replied.

Shannon could have given Tad the bare minimum of training, answering a few questions and collecting her pay. But just as Stan Settles had passed on his knowledge to Shannon, Shannon trained Tad as if he were one of her own.

She showed him how to bolt in the coil and to make sure the steel rings spun without touching the sides. Affix the wrong bullnose and the shaft could break.

“O.K.,” Shannon said. “It’s your turn.”

Tad worked on the Tocco all afternoon. Shannon noticed water leaking from the hoses. A loose hose could shoot water clear across the factory.

“Tighten down your hoses,” she said.

He had also installed the copper piece backward. But that was no big deal. He had skillfully navigated the challenges of translating English to Spanish, inches to meters. She felt proud of Tad.

Before he returned to Mexico, Tad pulled Shannon aside. He put his hand over his heart.

“My friend tells me that the reason a lot of people don’t like us is because we’re taking their jobs,” he said, sounding distraught.

“I’m not mad at you,” she said. “I’m happy that you get the opportunity to make some money. I was blessed for a while. I hate to see it go. Now it’s your turn to be blessed.”

Daughters and Sons 

May came. Thunder rumbled for minutes at a time, as if God were rolling a giant toolbox across the sky.

Shannon unclipped the barrette in her hair and tilted her head forward, revealing a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. Her daughter, Nicole, touched it gingerly, squinting.

In the midst of Carmella’s many surgeries, Shannon’s hair had fallen out in clumps. “Stress-related balding,” she said.

“I think it’s gotten smaller,” Nicole said. “Really.”

Shannon had fought bitterly for custody of Nicole, but she had run out of money for a lawyer. Nicole’s father won. After he died of a heart attack, Nicole moved in with his mother, Patricia Wynne. Shannon scraped together $5,000 for a down payment on a house nearby, in Whitestown, and Nicole spent some weekends there.

Shannon and Nicole had grown closer since the news of the factory’s closing. Shannon called often, weeping about her lost seniority and all the time she’d missed with her kids while she was at work. Nicole murmured, “We’ll make it through this,” as if she were the parent and Shannon the child.

Nicole, who had learned to call 911 by the age of 4 because of her parents’ fights, channeled her anxiety into timelines, budgets and lists. Now, she nudged her mother to think about the future.

“How many months do we have insurance?” Nicole asked.

“Six months,” Shannon replied. “After I lose my job.”

“What are we going to do when we don’t have health care?” Nicole asked. “What about Carmella?”

The questions hung in the spring air like a windsock, blowing this way and that.

An even bigger question loomed: Nicole had been accepted to Purdue University, but had no idea how she could afford to go. Nicole needed to let Purdue know that her mother was losing her job and could not help with tuition.

“I should be able to provide for you,” Shannon lamented. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do now. I will go back to school. I got to. Because it’s paid for. I need to take advantage of it.”

Shannon was eligible for up to two years of retraining under the federal government’s trade adjustment assistance program. But retraining for what? Nursing? She had taken a few nursing classes, years ago.

Nicole, who intended to study nursing herself, cocked her head to one side. “I’m not saying you’re old,” Nicole began.

Shannon laughed, as if conceding that nursing school was a wild idea.

A few weeks later, Shannon agonized about what to wear to Honors Night at Nicole’s school, when they would find out whether she had gotten any scholarships.

“I don’t want to embarrass my daughter, by no means,” she said.

She settled on a black dress with white stripes from J. C. Penney. She looked stately in it, and thought it would help her blend in with other mothers at the school. She’d picked up an outfit for her son, Bub, too: gray cargo pants and a blue shirt. He took them from her and retreated into the bathroom, past a pile of unwashed clothes.

Shannon sat in her front yard, wrapping strands of wet hair around yellow pencils, to make curls. She looked out across the country road at tilled fields of corn. In her yard, three dead cars and two dead trucks awaited resurrection. In the garage, her boyfriend, Larry Borer, cussed out an engine. Pit bulls barked in their pen.

Even without college, Nicole had already gone further than anyone else in Shannon’s house. Shannon and Larry both got their G.E.D., but Bub did not.

Shannon used to hold out hope that Bub would get a job at Rexnord. The factory was full of father-and-son pairs. Why not a mother and son?

But Bub needed a G.E.D. And then Carmella came into this world and got sick, and Bub had to care for her. And now Shannon was losing her own job.

She shook her head, which was full of pencils.

“Nicole and Bub are like night and day,” Shannon said.

Bub spent his days watching his daughter, an endless routine. Carmella dragged herself into the kitchen to explore the refrigerator. He tried to stop her. She flipped through a book of DVDs with fingerless hands and sighed. He played yet another children’s cartoon. He’d seen “Shimmer and Shine,” about two girls who fly away on a magic carpet, so many times that he could sing all the words.

For Bub, it was easy to lose track of what month it was, how long it had been since he had gone anywhere. Alarms went off on his phone at odd hours. One said “tea time.” Another, “go to work,” even though he hadn’t worked in years.

Shannon thought Bub should get out more with people his age. Maybe once the factory closed, she said, she could stay home with Carmella and Bub could get a job.

But Bub had fewer prospects for supporting the family than Shannon. He had held only one job in his life: unloading packages at FedEx for $11 an hour.

In this regard, he was not so different from other steelworkers’ sons. While daughters flocked to nursing, a job that couldn’t move overseas, sons seemed adrift. Some lived with their parents, picking up odd jobs like painting. Others stocked the shelves of warehouses.

At the high school, Shannon and Bub met up with Nicole’s grandmother, who had been “saying little prayers all day.”

Nicole had already gotten a few grants. But she still needed more than $30,000 for all four years of college. Doe-eyed and in a powder-blue dress, she took her seat on stage.

The principal began to announce the awards. But 20 minutes into the program, Nicole’s name had not been called. The room hushed at the first big scholarship, for $8,000.

“The late Betty and Gene Denger and family established a fund to assist a graduating senior to further their education,” said the principal, Kevin O’Rourke. “This year’s recipient is …”

Shannon gripped her program.

“Please God, please God,” she said.

“Lauren Hudson.”

Nicole’s lips pursed ever so slightly. Then she clapped.

Then another $8,000 award was announced: the Pliny & Mildred Randall Memorial Scholarship.

“The recipient must rank academically in the top third of their class,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “The recipient is …”

“Please God,” Shannon prayed.

“Nicole Wynne.”

Shannon fanned herself with the program.

“I’m going to cry,” she said.

Suddenly, Nicole began racking up awards. The biggest was the Isenhower Family Educational Scholarship, “designed to help students who have faced adversity, challenges or difficult life situations that might limit their ability to pursue their greatest potential.”

The amount: $20,000.

Nicole leaned forward as she walked to the front of the stage, as if plodding against a strong gale.

Shannon watched her daughter hug the wealthy people who were helping her overcome her difficult life situation.

“I can’t believe they’re going to give her all that money,” Shannon said.

New Job, No. Octopus Pool, Yes.

Summer came. The hot sun turned into a coil, hardening the earth below. The factory’s closing date got pushed from April to July because the plants in Monterrey, Mexico, and McAllen, Tex., were taking longer than expected to get up to speed.

Trainers returned with news about everything that was going wrong. Equipment was missing in Monterrey. A batch of bearings made in McAllen wouldn’t spin.

A joke went around the Indianapolis plant: “Rexnord has come out with a new line of bearings — the kind that doesn’t move.”

The sheer variety of bearings, which numbered in the thousands, made it difficult for the trainees to learn them all. Instructions were in English. And not every step had been written down.

Over the years, workers had been forced to make adjustments. “That’s in people’s little notebooks, and in their heads,” said Jim Swain, Shannon’s former supervisor.

The workers in Indianapolis were now needed more than ever, even as their layoffs loomed. They labored seven days a week, hating every minute of a job they didn’t know what they were going to do without.

Shannon had been putting off looking for new employment. But finally, on a humid July day, she asked for permission to leave the factory early to attend a job fair.

Others had already moved on. Her cousin Lorry got a job at Allison Transmission. It paid about $15 an hour. John Feltner, who had refused to train the new hires, got a job repairing machines at Kroger for $22.51 an hour, then found a better position at a mechanical contractor. Mark, still training in Mexico and Texas, was getting tired of living out of a suitcase.

Those who had yet to find work wandered into the job fair and found one another, giving the room the feel of a reunion.

Shannon ran into her friend Bill Jones, who’d quit abruptly. He was working as a trucker but wanted something better.

They approached a table set by the Sheet Metal Workers Local 20. “If you are not afraid of hard work and you show up every day, the sky is the limit,” a recruiter, Tim Choate, told them.

Shannon’s hand shot out for a brochure.

But the training period lasted five years. And pay started at $16.70 per hour. It would be years before she would make $33, journeyman’s pay.

“When is the next class?” Shannon asked.

“We’ll need your high school diploma,” Mr. Choate said. “A copy of your high school transcripts. Then we’ll send you for your test. Once you pass the test, we will have you in for an interview.”

Shannon’s brow furrowed.

“But eventually you get in, right?” she asked.

He smiled and admitted: “There’s no guarantee.”

Summer dragged on. The factory’s closing date got pushed forward again, to September. The empty spaces there had grown so big that Shannon couldn’t avoid them anymore. She rode a bicycle around the plant at night, pretending to be in “The Wizard of Oz.”

She knew that she needed to put herself on a budget. But she couldn’t. Shopping had become one of the few things she looked forward to.

As a kid, she’d hated buying groceries with her mother, ashamed of the food stamps they had used. In adulthood, Shannon liked the ritual of consumption.

She’d never felt much like the citizen of a democracy. “People like us,” she said, “aren’t heard.” But her job had transformed her into a consumer of things — another respected role in American society. She had achieved a status: the kind of person who buys Heinz ketchup instead of the generic brand.

Several times a week, she pushed her cart through the 24-hour Meijer superstore by her house. She passed the clothing section, where dresses made in Indonesia sold for $19. She knew that other Americans lost their jobs because they couldn’t make dresses that cheap. But she rarely thought of things in those terms, she said.

For champions of free trade, this is the true measure of prosperity. Jobs move overseas and wages stagnate, but Americans buy more stuff than ever.

Shannon knew she was in danger of losing her home. She pondered cashing in her 401(k) to pay the mortgage. Even so, she still filled the shopping cart with new toys for Carmella. That summer she bought a green octopus pool. A red plastic slide. A giant blowup bounce house, made in China.

“I see you here a lot,” the cashier at Meijer told her one night. “Where do you work?”

“Link-Belt,” Shannon replied. “It’s Rexnord now.”

The cashier’s smile faded. “Isn’t that the place that’s closing?”

Losing 2 Babies in a Week 

August came. Leaves danced in the air, like ash from a batch furnace. Shannon took a day off work to help move Nicole to college. Rain came out of nowhere, spewing down on their cars and ending just as quick.

“It’ll dry,” Shannon said of Nicole’s white bookshelf, which protruded from the trunk of her car. Earlier that morning, Shannon had secured it with a belt from her pants. She was the kind of woman who made do. But then Nicole’s grandmother, Patricia Wynne, retrieved a perfect coil of yellow rope. Grandma was the kind who planned ahead.

Then they set off. Three generations of women in three separate cars. Nicole led the way, with a Post-it note on her dashboard: “I believe in you — Grandma.” Patricia followed in her own car, packed with sheets and blankets. Shannon brought up the rear in her Hyundai.

To Shannon, this day was both a victory and a loss.

A victory in that her child was going farther than a factory. A loss in that the person Shannon leaned on the most was leaving.

“Nicole was my rock,” Shannon said, her voice cracking.

The hour’s drive to Purdue University felt like an unbearable distance to Shannon. It was as if Nicole were floating away on a life raft, while Shannon stayed behind on a sinking ship. She had gotten a few calls for job interviews. Fontana Fasteners, a factory in Frankfort, about 25 miles north of her house, had a machine like the Tocco. She sped past the Frankfort exit and made a mental note to call back.

Finally, the caravan reached the apartment complex where Nicole was going to live with two other girls.

Patricia scrubbed the bathroom floor while Shannon carried in the bookshelf.

“Don’t drink nothing you didn’t pour yourself,” Shannon warned.

“Have fun,” Patricia told Nicole as they hugged goodbye.

“Not too much fun,” Shannon corrected.

During the last round of hugging, Nicole and Shannon burst into tears.

The next day at the factory, Shannon watched yet another cord get cut.

Continue

She walked in to find Bob on the scissor lift, looming above the Tocco, a giant puddle on the floor.

“What’s going on?” Shannon asked.

But it was obvious. Bob was disconnecting the Tocco, days ahead of schedule.

Ricardo, the process engineer from Mexico, had arrived with his team to pack up the Tocco. Shannon had been looking forward to seeing Tad, the young trainee. She had a few more things to teach him. Time was running out. But Tad was nowhere to be found.

He got another job, Ricardo told Shannon, one that paid more than Rexnord did.

Instead of Tad, Ricardo had come with a new guy who barely spoke English. This time, Shannon didn’t bother to learn his name.

But she tried to be nice. She brought the Mexican team outside to look at the solar eclipse. Shannon felt the eyes of her American co-workers on her.

No one harbored illusions anymore that President Trump would save the plant. Shannon didn’t hold it against him. “Everybody’s fighting him,” she said.

She did worry when she heard on the news that he was trying to roll back a federally funded health care program that Carmella relied on.

Mr. Trump was turning into just another politician, the same way Link-Belt was turning into just another brand.

Shannon, who’d derived her self-worth from the quality of the bearings she made, felt unsure about who she’d become.

In two weeks’ time, her job would end. Her trip to Mexico would be canceled at the last minute, along with the $5,000 bonus she had been counting on. Training costs had gone over budget and needed to be reined in.

More than 17 years on the factory floor came down to this: the Tocco, disconnected from water and electricity, waiting to be cut into pieces. Ricardo stood at a table nearby, swaddling the last of its coils in Bubble Wrap.

Shannon didn’t offer to help.

She walked outside to smoke. She didn’t want Ricardo to see her cry.

Later that same day, a heat treat worker complained that when Ricardo had set up the Tocco to run one last batch of parts, the coil had gotten too hot. But Ricardo pressed on. Maybe he was confident in his work, Shannon thought, or maybe he was in a hurry to finish the order before the Tocco was hauled away.

“I’d like to see the sample,” Shannon said.

She slipped into the lab and found the scrap of steel archived in a drawer. She put it under the microscope.

But then she thought about the dying factory. The turning department, with two lonely machines left. Grinding, nearly gone. The place where assembly once stood marked with tape on the floor, like a crime scene.

Suddenly, she turned the microscope off.

“Forget it,” she said. “It’s not my problem anymore.”

_____

Farah Stockman, a national correspondent with The New York Times, interviewed 23 workers and four managers from the Rexnord factory over the course of seven months. Rexnord did not give permission to enter the factory; descriptions of scenes there were based on interviews, photographs and video recordings.

Michel Vega contributed reporting from Mexico City.



Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826




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