“No questions,” he said, and then he told employees they would have an hour-long break in the cafeteria to process the news before returning to their lines.
A similar announcement had come earlier that day at one of UTEC’s partner factories, a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis, where the mention of Mexico to the plant’s 1,300 employees had been followed by cussing and boos. Donald Trump had issued a statement – “disgusting,” “un-American” – and some Carrier employees had threatened to destroy equipment in the latest wave of the betrayal and rage that had become so much of a part of the political moment.
But in polite-and-steady Huntington, the cafeteria stayed quiet except for the hum of the vending machines. A psychologist who had been brought in to counsel workers waited alone at her table. The company security guards eventually wandered off to eat lunch. UTEC employees sat quietly in the cafeteria and watched the clock, until finally Setser stood and motioned for others to follow. “Let’s go,” he had said, and none of his co-workers had any doubt about where he was going, because there was no other choice.
They still had their jobs. Those jobs were the thing keeping them in the shrinking 49 percent of the middle class. So with five minutes left before the end of the hour, all 250 UTEC employees returned to their places on the lines.
His solution to every problem had always been work. Work harder. Work weekends. Work doubles. Work a second job. In Northeast Indiana, the epicenter of American manufacturing, everything was right there if you were just willing to work for it, so in the weeks after the announcement Setser had taken every available shift, increasing his hours and working 19 consecutive nights while still making it back home on school days to stand on the porch and wait for the bus.
Every evening was a sit-down family dinner. Every dinner they took turns going around the table to talk about their days. Every night they finished dinner and sat together to watch movies in the living room, where now Setser’s fiancee, Jennifer Bowers, was looking over plans for their summer wedding. It would be her first marriage and his third. She had been looking online for a photographer, but so far the only one she liked charged more than $1,000.
“I know we have to start cutting corners, but we don’t want to cut on this,” she said.
“It’s just bad timing,” Setser said. He had done the math, and the photographer would cost the equivalent of a little more than two weeks in take-home pay. And while that wouldn’t have mattered before February, now it did.
“We’re only getting married once,” Bowers said. “A good wedding, some nice family pictures – that seems like a basic thing to have.”
“What about building up a little cushion?” he said, because that seemed like a basic thing, too.
Together between his overtime and Bowers’s small salary at another manufacturer in Fort Wayne, they had remained firmly in the middle class by finding ways to make their money stretch. When they wanted to drive to Florida for their first overnight vacation in a decade, Setser could volunteer for more overtime to save up the cash. When they wanted a new TV, he could spend the 10 percent premium he earned for working third shift. He had cashed out part of his 401(k) account to pay for his daughter’s braces, purchased some of their basic household items with credit cards and taken out a no-money-down loan on their $95,000 house.
He had never worried too much about saving money, because there was always more to make. Every night was another shift. Every week was another paycheck. It was Day One to Day Dead, but now a few executives from Mexico had begun visiting the UTEC factory to prepare for the move and the layoff was closing in.
“I don’t want to spend too much and put us in a bad position,” Setser said, thinking of the photographer.
“We’re talking about a family heirloom,” Bowers said. “This is what we will look back on. This is who we are.”
He squinted and pursed his lips. He looked back at her and nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “We can make it work.”
It was beginning to seem to him as though that was the new ethos of Huntington: from “The Town That Works” to making it work, and now the sun was rising on the cornfields, the local radio broadcaster was shouting, “Good morning Hoosier Heartland!” and Mark Wickersham was in his downtown office as director of economic development.
It was his job to recruit businesses into Huntington – to sell the viability of the town and its workforce – and for generations the product had mostly sold itself. It had state-of-the-art manufacturing parks and easy shipping by train or freeway. It had two lakes, an operating drive-in theater and a museum to honor Vice President Dan Quayle, a longtime resident whose endorsement of the city during one campaign stop in the 1980s had been reprinted and displayed all across town: “Here we’re taught the values of middle America, like faith in God, family, neighbor helping neighbor, the dignity of work, morality, integrity and personal responsibility,” he had said.
“Through hard work and determination we can achieve anything!” Wickersham had written in his own business recruiting pitch, and somehow during his career he had successfully helped Huntington’s leadership stave off one crisis after the next while upholding a middle class life for the 85 percent. They had saved downtown from the drain of the freeway bypass. They had opened job centers and retrained the manufacturing workforce. They had used generous state and local tax breaks to lure manufacturers from Germany, Japan, Brazil and Australia. A year after the recession, the town’s manufacturing parks were nearly full and the unemployment rate had dropped to 5 percent, even if some of those new jobs paid 10 or 15 percent less than what the middle class had been earning a decade before.
“We are certainly aware and concerned that Joe Lunchbox is still behind the eight ball,” Wickersham said, and now he was at already at work staving off another crisis, this time at UTEC.
“There’s always another big blow, but we always recover,” he said. “That’s ingenuity. That’s a community that comes together during the hard times and pushes ahead.”
But that was also first-shift optimism in a three-shift town, where it was Tom Lewandowski’s job to protect the other two shifts. “We’ve got a whole lot of smart people in smart suits, just whistling their way through a graveyard,” said Lewandowski, a union organizer in Fort Wayne, who was now traveling to Huntington to survey the mental health of employees at UTEC.
