“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.”
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
On February 10, 2016, Brian Easton pulled into work an hour early, just as he had done every day for the past twenty-five years. The big, burly, blue-eyed man entered the large beige warehouse beneath a soaring American flag. It was the same factory that his wife worked at and his two kids too. He got his coffee, inventoried his parts, and prepared for a hard day’s work. But something was different today. That’s weird, he thought as he observed a platform that had been erected near the front of the room. Not thinking too much of it, Brian continued with his normal routine.
T. J. Bray also arrived at Carrier’s furnace plant in Indianapolis that chilly Wednesday morning, the same company that five of his aunts and uncles had dedicated 125 years of their working lives to. Carrying on the family tradition, T.J. joined his two cousins in working at the plant. “It was kind of meant for me to work there . . . I’ve almost been there half my life,” the friendly thirty-three-year-old midwesterner told me as he reflected on his fifteen years of work. “It’s the only adult job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I graduated high school on May 22, and my first night of work was May 21, so I had to miss my second night of work to get my diploma.” Missing work was rare for T. J. Bray. Rain or snow, bronchitis or flu, it didn’t matter: T.J. always showed up for work. It was in his DNA.
T.J. remembers when his mom briskly woke him up one morning as a freshman in high school. “There’s something wrong with your dad,” she told him. Rushing into the other room, T.J. arrived to find his dad lying on the floor in a pool of blood. “It looked like a murder scene,” he recalled.
“Get me up,” his dad implored, fighting against the crimson liquid that his body exuded. “I’ll get in the shower and head to work.”
“You probably lost 20 percent of your blood. You’re not going to work!” T.J. replied.
“No. no. I’m good.”
“Let’s help him up,” T.J.’s mom insisted.
The fourteen-year-old T.J. helped his husky, six-foot-one-inch father to his feet and they waited for an ambulance. At the hospital Terry Bray found out that he had a ruptured ulcer, a potentially life-threatening condition if left untreated.
Unconcerned with the news, Terry asked the doctor, “Can I get a phone? I’ve gotta tell my boss I’m going to be late.”
“Buddy, you’re probably not going to be at work for a while,” the doctor replied.
“When am I going to get out of here so I can go back to work?” T.J.’s father repeatedly asked.
T.J. vividly remembers his dad’s disappointment at his inability to return to work. Mr. Bray worked for Federal Express his whole life, and T.J.’s mom started out as a waitress at Steak ’n Shake in the 1970s. Spending decades with the fast-food joint, Rhonda became a manager and then a district manager before finally earning a spot on the corporate side of the company. “She never called in sick,” T.J. said. “There were no off days for her and my dad.” It’s memories like these that instilled in T.J. a relentless work ethic.
Brian Easton, T.J. ’s coworker and friend, was cut from the same cloth. On June 7, 2014, Brian had an ACL replacement, a surgery that keeps most people inactive for six months.1 On July 7 of that same year, he had spinal fusion surgery on his L4 and L5 vertebrae, another major surgery that can cause pain for up to six months.2 Despite two serious operations, Brian was back on his feet at the Indiana plant on August 7, exactly one month later. “It was hell for six months,” Brian said.
T.J. and Brian were tough, high-caliber workers and they were loyal. But on that February morning, they found out that loyalty only ran one way. Just before 10:00 a.m., T.J. received a text from the union president. “Hey, I need everyone up front right now. I’ve got bad news.” T.J. dropped what he was doing and barreled toward the front of the room. As he made his way to the gathering of union stewards, he could hear a voice over the PA system calling every department up front, one factory line at a time. Something ain’t right here, he thought.
T.J. approached the small group of union leaders and noticed the same stage that Brian had curiously observed earlier that morning. Big event-style speakers sat on either side of the stage, where roughly two dozen suited men stood waiting. A rope separated the indifferent corporate suits from the growing crowd of workers. Security guys stood watch with guns firmly planted on their hips.
As T.J. joined the group, blissfully unprepared for the news he was about to hear, Brian’s radio blared: “Tell all the forklift drivers to pull up, get off their fork trucks, and head up front.” Brian and his fellow group leaders then got additional instructions. “Tell all the press operators to shut down their presses,” the voice demanded. “They shut down all the lines,” Brian recalled. A bustling factory now stood motionless.
Brian encountered a high-level boss during his walk to the stage. “As soon as I saw his face, I knew what was going on,” Brian said. “He looks like he saw a ghost.” Not wanting to ask a question that would prompt an unwanted answer, Brian nevertheless probed his supervisor: “What’s up?” “Just go up there,” the man replied. Brian knew in his heart what was about to happen. As he made his way up front, Brian’s sister called him on his cell phone. “Are they hiring yet?” she asked, inquiring on behalf of her niece. Carrier started hiring in the spring, and they always prioritized family first.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think we’re getting ready to lose our jobs,” Brian answered.
“No way.”
“Yeah, I think we’re getting ready to lose our jobs,” Brian repeated.
Across the room, the union president told the blue-collar union stewards huddled alongside a few dozen disaffected suits: “They’re getting ready to tell these people their jobs are going to Mexico.” T.J.’s heart sank.
“What?!” they all said in disbelief.
“OK, that’s not funny,” one union steward countered.
“We thought it was a joke,” T.J. recounted.
“No, I am dead serious,” the union president sadly replied.
T.J.’s thoughts immediately turned from himself—a husband and dad of two—to his coworkers. He had just taken the position as their union steward two short weeks earlier, and now he was burdened with delivering the terrible news. I have to text as many of my coworkers as I can, T.J. thought.
“I was trying to get it to everybody before they heard it from that guy,” T.J. said. “I’ve got a lot of family there.” He texted his cousins and friends, receiving replies like No they’re not and BS. Brian was among those who received a text from T.J. We’re closing down, the message read. Oh my God, Brian thought as he tried to process his confirmed suspicion. His entire family would be losing their jobs.
With a crowd full of men and women in sweatpants, ball caps, and T-shirts standing before him, the man in the crisp suit and tie took to the stage. He calmly began to deliver his prepared remarks. Wanting to capture the moment, T.J. kept his phone down by his waist and began filming. Even though filming wasn’t allowed, one young woman held her phone high in the air in defiance, capturing the corporate official’s every move and every word.
As he built up to those unwelcome words, the room grew eerily silent. In a monotone voice, the man stated, “The best way to stay competitive and protect the business for the long term is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico.” The crowd instantly erupted into impassioned boos and jeers. “You f***ing sellout!” Brian cried out repeatedly in a booming voice. One man put his hand over his mouth in visible shock, while another man in a Pittsburgh Steelers beanie and safety glasses left the scene in apparent frustration.
While the audience reacted in audible confusion, grief, and outrage, the man on the stage impatiently stated, “Listen, I’ve got information that’s important to share. If you don’t want to hear it, other people do, so let’s quiet down.” Shouts and boos continued across the room as 1,400 Americans learned that they would be losing their jobs in what was “strictly a business decision.” After giving the loyal employees a mere two minutes to take in their new reality, the man reminded the crowd, “Throughout the transition, we must remain committed to manufacturing the same high-quality products” before admonishing, “Once again, please quiet down.”
A subsequent speaker told the crowd that they would have the remainder of the day off, but most of the workers just stood around in shock, hugging and crying. T.J. stayed for a while before rushing out of the factory in the hopes of telling his wife he had lost his job before she saw it on the news. After hearing the news, T.J.’s wife left work and suggested the couple meet at Chili’s for a beer. When T.J. got to the well-known bar and grill, the first thing he did was post the audio he captured on Facebook with the caption “Wow. 14 years down the drain.”
“I was hurt,” Brian said. “And I’m not going to lie. You know, I made it until I got home that day.” When Brian returned to his house that Wednesday afternoon, the big, burly hunter with bulky tattooed arms cried his eyes out. “I went in the house. I went up there to the spare bedroom and shut the door and cried like a little baby.” After fifteen minutes he regained his composure and went back out to his family.
“Just calm down. It’s going to be OK. We’re going to figure something out,” his wife reassured him.
Brian was proud to work at Carrier. He had attended college for one year and quickly realized that it just wasn’t for him. When he got hired on at Carrier in 1997, he thought to himself, I can move up around here. This doesn’t just have to be a job. This can be a career. Within five years he became a press operator. Within seven, a fab tech. And within eleven he became a group leader in the fabrication department.
During his time at Carrier, Brian eagerly did anything his supervisor asked him to do. He volunteered to test every new product, a sometimes arduous task. He took classes on lean manufacturing and learned how to set up lines. “I did it because I wanted the place that I work at to be successful. Not only did I want to be successful, but I wanted them to be successful,” he explained. “But then, to find out in the end they want to be successful but they don’t give two shits about us . . . you know that’s tough.” Brian’s hurt eventually turned to apprehension. “I was nervous. I was scared,” he said.
It wasn’t just individuals who were scared but entire families. “Everybody there just about has got a family member working there,” Brian explained. “I mean, heck, the Thermans—”
T.J. interjected: “The Thermans, the Brookens. I mean. they’ve got four or five brothers and sisters that all work there.”
While some families learned their fates that morning in a face-to-face interaction, the night-shift workers learned from Facebook, text messages, or their local news before officially finding out that night during a meeting of their own. T.J.’s phone lit up with text messages all day and night. Is this true? they asked.
For years the workers at Carrier had heard rumors: maybe one day Carrier would go to Mexico. But there were no indications that February 10, 2016, was the day. On the contrary, all the writing on the wall suggested Carrier was staying right there in Indianapolis. Over the last five years the company had spent millions of dollars investing in the facility: refurbished lines, new equipment, renovated office areas, modern furniture, and flat-screen TVs. “They spent millions of dollars just on epoxy floor,” Brian remembers. On top of the investment, the Carrier factory was winning awards for its parent company, UTC—quality awards, industrial awards, environmental awards. Every year management told the workers, “You’re UTC’s gold standard, making record profits.” Thinking back, T.J. reflected, “Why would we think anything was wrong when we’re making record profits?”
In the intervening months, T.J. and Brian both grappled with hurt, anger, and even self-blame. “You look at the decisions you’ve made in life,” Brian said. “You’ve alienated yourself just to this one path. Factory workers are a dying breed. Why have I done this to myself?” By Brian’s estimate, there have been at least thirty major manufacturing facilities that have left Indianapolis since the late 1980s, maybe more. Including the smaller factories, that number is probably closer to one hundred, he thinks.
Two weeks before the announcement, T.J. began to question his path. “What have I done in my life?” he asked. “I worked at a factory. Like, if I die right now, what would people say? What did I do in my life?” As T.J. wondered about his career choice, the union asked him to become a union steward. After some hesitation, TJ agreed to a role that would set him on an unforgettable journey.
When Carrier made the unwelcome announcement on that brisk winter morning, they told the workers that there would be no impact on jobs until 2017, providing them more than a year’s notice. “It was a curse and a blessing that they did that,” T.J. said. “It was a blessing because we had a year and a half to figure out what to do next, but a curse because you’re just standing around, waiting for your funeral.” Unbeknownst to T.J., it was a funeral that would never come. T.J. was about to become a national figure, and the intervention of a presidential candidate would change everything.
“Something put me on this path. I was questioning,” T.J. said. “If I die tomorrow, my kids will have all these newspaper clippings and photos of stuff I’ve done. And they can say, ‘Man, look: Dad stood up for something he believed in.’ ”
When the callous corporate official announced to a room full of Carrier workers that they were losing their jobs, he was likely unaware of the young woman filming just beyond the stage. And the young woman filming was admittedly unaware of the momentous reaction her video would provoke. In just one night three million people viewed that video, taken from the phone of a Carrier employee and posted on YouTube. Brian can be heard screaming his terse “F***ing sellouts!”
“I still can’t watch the video,” T.J. told me during our first conversation. “I have to turn away.” The video brings back the stomach-dropping memory of betrayal. The curt announcement contrasted starkly with the audible reaction of distraught workers. America took notice.
“It seemed like every channel you turned on, that video was on there,” Brian remembered. It was one of the few news stories that broke through the near-constant coverage of the presidential primaries.
Shortly after the video went viral, then-candidate Donald Trump tweeted out a still shot of the video and wrote, “I am the only one who can fix this. Very sad. Will not happen under my watch!”3 During the CBS Republican presidential debate that evening, Trump mentioned the Carrier workers. Describing the video, he vividly recounted the scene to a watching nation, “They’re laid off. They were crying . . . it was a very sad situation . . . I’m going to tell them right now, I am going to get consensus from Congress and we’re going to tax you when those air conditioners come.”4 Trump was the only Republican candidate in that debate to mention the Carrier workers, who would become a constant line of reference for him on the campaign trail. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders highlighted the plight of the Carrier workers, joining them at a rally at the Indiana statehouse.5
I asked T.J. and Brian how union members felt about Trump, Sanders, and Clinton during the primaries. “Nobody was for Clinton,” T.J. instantly replied.
“It was NAFTA, Benghazi,” explained Brian. “The whole whitewashing of her servers.”
“It was trust,” added T.J.
“And not to mention the list of people that seem to die around the Clintons,” Brian replied with a sarcastic chuckle.
“[S]he was for TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] and then she was running for president—oh, now she’s against TPP!” T.J. quipped, then returning to a serious demeanor, “So I think a lot of people had no trust in her . . . I don’t know one big Clinton person last year at all.”
“I really didn’t,” Brian confirmed.
T.J.’s and Brian’s political leanings in 2016 are emblematic of the political divisions within Carrier and among unions nationwide. T.J. supported Bernie Sanders because he wasn’t a “corporate candidate” like Hillary, propped up by the DNC, while Brian supported Trump because of an article he read years ago. In the article Trump mentioned that one of the things that made him successful was not being afraid to let someone go who was incapable of doing the job. “I see that around me every day. I see people that are incapable at doing their job, and we just hold on,” Brian explained, a rationale he would later expound upon in surprising detail.
“Trump was the first Republican I voted for,” Brian said.
“There was a lot of Trump,” T.J. told me.
“But it wasn’t visible,” Brian pointed out. “There was this persona that if you were a Trump supporter, you were—you know—you’re racist.”
“You’re racist, you’re this—” TJ said.
“It got so bad,” Brian recalled. “There were people that would come up and approach my wife and say something: ‘If your husband feels this way, then why are you with him? He’s obviously racist.’ ”
“And he’s married to a black woman,” T.J. added, to emphasize the ridiculousness of the accusation.
“It just got to a point where I just wouldn’t post anything [on Facebook anymore],” Brian said.
In the primary, T.J.’s local union endorsed Bernie Sanders, but in the general election they endorsed neither Trump nor Clinton. The United Steelworkers, by contrast, endorsed Clinton during the general. In fact, more than forty unions and trade associations endorsed Clinton during the 2016 general election, while just three officially declared their support for Trump. But endorsements didn’t seem to matter: there was a mutiny among the rank and file, who rebelled against their leadership and voted for Trump in droves. It was those crucial votes of rank-and-file union members in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that ultimately made the difference in electing Trump.
It was a very real phenomenon that the New York Times pointed to in a January 2016 article headlined “Union Leans Democratic, but Donald Trump Gets Members’ Attention.”6 This prescient passage from the article grabbed my attention when I read it just days before the Iowa caucuses: “[Union leaders] fear that Mr. Trump, if not effectively countered, may draw an unusually large number of union voters in a possible general election matchup. This could, in turn, bolster Republicans in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which President Obama won twice.”7
With nearly a year to go before the general election, the reporter at the Times had managed to isolate the very states that would be essential to Trump’s victory. Trump indeed went on to carry all four of those states in November, and the Democrats never saw it coming. Throughout the election, as Clinton counted blue-collar support as a foregone conclusion, Trump remained sharply focused on the plight of the American worker and recognized the struggle of workers like Brian and T.J.
“I know my parents, their generation, they could say, you know, if you were willing to work and work hard, you could make a decent living,” Brian said.
“Yeah, and it’s going to pay off,” T.J. emphasized.
“And have nice things and, you know, live this so-called American dream. It’s getting to the point now where you can’t.”
“It’s not happening anymore,” T.J. observed. “Now you have to have both parents working . . . Everything’s going up. Food prices are going up. Gas price is going up. You know education is so outrageously, ridiculously expensive. My wife’s going to pay for school loans for the next thirty-three years.”
But it’s not just in the manufacturing hubs of Indiana that the apprehension of the American citizen was found during Election 2016. Economic angst was felt nationwide. It was felt among the 57 percent of Americans who told Gallup in September of 2016 that they believed the economy was getting worse.8 It was felt by the 60 percent of battleground voters who said the economy was rigged against them.9 And it’s felt by the middle-class families who will see their health care premiums rise by 22 percent.10
And in the face of this economic malaise, President Barack Obama boasted that “America’s economy is not just better than it was eight years ago—it is the strongest, most durable economy in the world.”11 Obama’s remark reminded me of an out-of-touch encounter I had on a television set during the presidential race. A Democratic pundit held up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and said, “Oh, look, wages are going up. If only we could get the news out there, people may vote for Clinton.” I thought to myself, You shouldn’t have to tell voters how to feel about their paycheck. They should feel it. They should see it in their paycheck. It should be tangible.
Nevertheless, my peer was making a mistake that politicians throughout the 2016 primary were making: they were telling voters how to feel rather than listening to them. Listening is something that Donald Trump did and excelled at. Rather than using focus groups to test his words or adhering to the party line during the primary, he opted for unscripted straight talk and used common sense when discussing the issues. It earned him the ire of his peers, but it also earned him the presidency of the United States and, for the moment, leadership of the people’s movement to take back government.
Just five minutes into the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump turned the focus to workers, and Carrier in particular. “All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air-conditioning in Indianapolis: they fired 1,400 people, they’re going to Mexico. So many, hundreds and hundreds of companies, are doing this. We cannot let it happen,” Trump admonished.12
Some union members, like Brian, heard this and showed up for Trump. Others, like T.J., didn’t. But distrusting workers like T.J., despite not supporting Trump, were still integral to Clinton’s defeat. “I left it blank. I didn’t vote for Hillary and didn’t vote for Donald,” T.J. said.
“I mean, your average person that was a Democrat, they would say they were going to vote for Clinton. They didn’t want to,” Brian added.
“They didn’t want to,” T.J. echoed.
Silent support for Trump propelled the president to victory on November 8, and neither T.J. nor Brian was prepared for what would come next. T.J. noted, “If you would have told me that day when I lost my job, ‘Oh, yeah, President Donald Trump is going to be here announcing he’s going to save my job,’ I’d be, like, ‘OK, you’re full of shit.’ ”
T. J. Bray was in New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when he got the surprising call. Trump had just been elected president weeks earlier, and T.J. had done an interview with NBC Nightly News. In the segment, the reporter stated, “Workers say they have high expectations for the president-elect,” after which, T.J. can be heard saying, “If he [Trump] can come here and save these fourteen hundred jobs tomorrow, I’ll gladly vote for him again.”13 Later in the nationally televised piece, T.J. sent a message to the incoming president: “We want you to do what you said you’re going to do. We’re going to hold you accountable.”
Just over a week later, while T.J. was vacationing in New York, he received a phone call from a coworker, delivering some surprising news. “Hey, did you see Trump’s tweet?” the coworker urgently inquired. T.J. pulled up Twitter and found an unexpected announcement from the president-elect: “I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier A.C. Company to stay in the U.S. (Indiana). MAKING PROGRESS—Will know soon!”14 About an hour later, Carrier also tweeted, “Carrier has had discussions with the incoming administration and we look forward to working together. Nothing to announce at this time.”15
What prompted this? T.J. wondered. No one seemed to know.
Back home at Carrier, things were quiet. The union knew nothing, and for five days the workers pondered the prospects of a deal. The local union’s president, Chuck Jones, expressed skepticism. “I think it’s a long shot. I hope they aren’t playing with people’s emotions,” Jones told CNN.16 Others, like Brian, were confident. “I had a pretty good idea there was a chance that our jobs were being saved, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” he said. “I figured the announcement would come at Christmastime.” But the deal came much sooner than expected.
Just after Thanksgiving, Carrier night-shift workers noticed men in suits entering and leaving the plant. “We never see corporate people. Never. So everyone was, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ” T.J. said.
“Facebook was blowing up,” Brian remembered. “People were inboxing, ‘What’s going on? We’ve got secret service up here. A bunch of guys in suits. People with guns.’ ”
Windows in one of the big meeting rooms were covered so people couldn’t see in. Something big was brewing. “I was up until 3:00 a.m. in the morning,” Brian said. “I had to be up at 4:30 a.m., but I just couldn’t go to bed, you know?”
On the night of Tuesday, November 29, Carrier made the announcement: “We are pleased to have reached a deal with President-elect Trump & VP-elect Pence to keep close to 1,000 jobs in Indy. More details soon.”17 Three hours later came the almost simultaneous news that Trump would be visiting Carrier. “I will be going to Indiana on Thursday to make a major announcement concerning Carrier A.C. staying in Indianapolis. Great deal for workers!” he tweeted.18
“I didn’t expect it to come as soon as it did, and I was, like, ‘Wow!’ ” Brian said. The media predictably tried to find a negative spin on an undeniably pro-Trump story. Rather than headlines giving the president-elect hard-earned credit, they read:
“Trump Saved Jobs at Carrier by Making a Bad Deal for America”19
“Is Trump’s Deal with Carrier a Form of Crony Capitalism?”20
“Trump’s Carrier Shakedown”21
The headlines insinuated that Trump had promised some sort of nefarious payoff to keep the Carrier jobs here. The revelation that Carrier would be receiving $7 million in incentives over a decade to stay in the U.S. was immediately derided. This was corporate cronyism, they cried! In reality, the $500,000 a year in state incentives was mere “window dressing” that “rarely change a firm’s behavior,” according to experts.22 The money paled in comparison to the $65 million Carrier would save in moving to Mexico. Carrier’s rationale for staying in the U.S. was more likely the very one the company cited: an improved economy under the incoming Trump administration.23
The next few days were eventful ones for the 1,400 Carrier workers as the soon-to-be leader of the free world prepared to head to the Indiana factory. A hand-selected group of workers were chosen to attend Trump’s speech based on seniority, criminal background check, and other criteria. T.J. was among them.
The next day T.J. arrived to find Secret Service agents everywhere and metal detectors at Carrier’s point of entry. Shortly after he got in the room, an HR boss tapped T.J. on the shoulder. “Hey, T.J., can you come here?” the boss asked. “I want you to meet this woman, the vice president of communications for UTC [United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company].” The boss escorted T.J. into a hallway and to the waiting executive. “Hi, Mr. Bray,” the woman said, introducing herself. “I just got a phone call from the Trump administration. They have specifically asked that you sit in the front.”24
What’s going on? T.J. wondered.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” T.J. jokingly asked.
“I think it’s a good thing.”25
T.J. took his seat, right in the front. As he sat among his Carrier coworkers, a voice broke the silence. “Ladies and gentleman,” the voice said as the workers simultaneously raised their phones to take video. “Please welcome the chairman, the chief executive officer of United Technologies, Greg Hayes.” Hayes walked up to the podium as three security men crossed in front of him. Standing behind a podium with the blue and white Carrier logo emblazoned and in front of a backdrop littered with dozens more Carrier logos, Hayes told the crowd that the incoming Trump-Pence administration planned to improve the U.S. business environment “through tax reform and through a more thoughtful approach to regulation.”26 The new presidency gave UTC renewed confidence in the future and the ability to keep 1,100 jobs in Indiana.
Vice President elect Mike Pence followed Mr. Hayes and proclaimed, “Thanks to the initiative and the leadership of President-elect Donald Trump, Carrier has decided to stay and grow right here in America.”27 After describing the inaction of the Obama administration, the vice president elect said, “President-elect Donald Trump did just what he said he would do . . . He picked up the phone and talked from one American to another . . . He made the case for America.” That made the difference. “It is my high honor and distinct privilege,” Pence continued, “to introduce to you a man of action, a man of his word, and the president-elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump.”
As President-elect Trump emerged from behind the curtain with victorious music reverberating around the room, the Carrier workers stood in applause, raising their phones higher into the air. After some brief introductory remarks and thank-yous, that surprising revelation came out, the one T.J. didn’t expect.
“I’ll never forget. About a week ago, I was watching the nightly news. I won’t say which one because I don’t want to give them credit because I don’t like them much. I’ll be honest. I don’t like them, not even a little,” Trump said as the room broke out in laughter. “But they were doing a story on Carrier . . . They had a gentleman. Worker. Great guy. Handsome guy. He was on, and it was like he didn’t even know they were leaving.” T.J. began to gather that the incoming president might be referring to him. “He said something to the effect, ‘No, we’re not leaving because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise,” Trump continued, describing how the nightly news then played a clip of Trump saying “Carrier will never leave.” Trump clarified that that was a euphemism, but he understood how it could be interpreted the way the worker heard it.
Then came that unforgettable moment for T.J. “So now, because of him, whoever that guy was, is he in the room by any chance?” Trump asked, looking around for the young worker. T.J. prepared to stand and be acknowledged, but before he could, one of his coworkers in the far back of the room shouted, “That’s my son!” Trump responded, “That’s your son? Stand up. You did a good job. You did a great job, right? That’s fantastic. And I love your shirt.” The woman stood up, proudly displaying her Trump shirt to the cameras. Several of the Carrier men and women were perplexed, knowing that was not T.J.’s mom. She was the mother of another Carrier factory worker, but T.J. was the one who had gone on NBC Nightly News.
After Trump saw T.J.’s segment in early November, he immediately recognized that he had to do something. The very next morning, he called Mr. Hayes to try and save those jobs. He told Hayes, “We have to do something . . . we can’t allow this to happen anymore with our country. So many jobs are leaving and going to other countries.” Days of active negotiation resulted in the saving of American jobs.
When the speech ended, T.J. went to shake the president-elect’s hand and thank him, taking pictures as he moved along the rope line. “I wanted to make sure I shook his hand,” T.J. said. When he returned home to join his wife and her family, T.J.’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law, big Trump supporters, prodded him, saying, “I want to shake your hand because you shook his!”
After Trump’s Carrier speech, news networks scrambled to find the mysterious Carrier man whose nightly news interview prompted Trump to save jobs. “Well, I’ll tell you who that guy was,” one CNN anchor said. “We just grabbed him and put him in front of a camera.” The anchor asked the worker, “Do you remember the day that you were interviewed by a news network about jobs leaving your company?” The young man looked from side to side and took a very long, awkward pause. “No, I don’t. No, I don’t, actually.”28 The employee was indeed the child of the mom who had stood up during Trump’s speech and took credit, but he was not the man whom Trump had seen on the nightly news.
Later that afternoon, T.J. received a call from a CNBC producer. “I think Trump was talking about you,” the producer said. “Let me make some phone calls and get back to you.” The producer called back. “We just talked to someone from the administration, and they said that’s why they called you up. They wanted to acknowledge you,” the woman said. The next day NBC Nightly News ran a piece highlighting T.J.’s role in saving the Carrier jobs. Like dominos, other outlets ran with the story: the local news, CNN, Fox News. T.J.’s words had prompted action, and the media took notice.
I asked Brian whether the president-elect saving jobs swayed any Carrier Democrats his way. “No,” he said. “There were some people that wanted us still to lose our jobs.”
“Really?” I exclaimed.
“Yeah,” they both replied simultaneously.
“They just wanted to be able to say that Trump couldn’t do it . . . Now, that’s spiteful,” Brian said.
The thought seemed shocking, and yet, the days that followed the president-elect’s announcement would showcase some of the ungrateful attitudes Brian had referenced. About a week after Trump came to Indiana, Chuck Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, told the Washington Post that the president-elect “lied his ass off” when he claimed to save 1,100 jobs.29 In reality, according to the union leader, he had only saved 730 production jobs, meaning 550 workers would still lose their jobs.
But Trump was not lying. As the Carrier workers explained to me, when Trump echoed UTC in saying 1,100 jobs were staying, he was including four hundred white-collar and research-and-development jobs already slated to stay. Even so, the workers were understandably dismayed. When Carrier tweeted out that a deal had been reached, naturally, all the Carrier employees just assumed they were staying. The confusion prompted Chuck Jones to call the president-elect a liar.
“Did most people like Chuck Jones saying Trump lied his ass off?” I asked the workers, half expecting them to say yes.
“No!” T.J. said.
“No, no,” Brian echoed. “See, that’s what pissed me off. Because I feel like Chuck Jones slit the throats of the employees at Rexnord.”
Rexnord was another company a mile down the road from Carrier that announced it too was leaving the United States. T. J. Bray had been fighting, not just for Carrier, but also for Rexnord—the plant that his grandpa had spent forty years at. After jobs were saved at Carrier, the Rexnord employees’ hopes were raised. “Trump tweeted twice about Rexnord,” T.J. said. “And so they had a lot of hope.”
“The world’s eyes were on us,” Brian said. “There was an opportunity for Rexnord to seize the same thing we were getting . . . to steal a little bit of that thunder too and possibly save their jobs. And then here comes Chuck Jones running his mouth. It’s, like, ‘How dare you?’ ”
It wasn’t just that Jones stopped the momentum for some unrelated neighboring company: he actively represented Rexnord too as president of Local 1999. Incensed by Chuck Jones’s actions, Brian asked, “Why would you let your personal pride get in the way of helping people that have not only worked there but have mouths to feed, have families, have kids, [all] to have a pissing contest with Donald Trump?”
“Carrier people were saying, ‘Man, I can’t believe Chuck did that. He f***ed with people,” T.J. remembered. T.J. texted some Rexnord employees in the aftermath and asked their thoughts on Chuck’s comments.
“We’re mad as hell,” they responded.
The story of the workers at the Carrier manufacturing plant is the story of many in twenty-first-century America. America’s trade deficit with China, repeatedly decried by candidate Donald Trump, has cost approximately 3.2 million jobs over the course of a decade.30 A host of factors—not least among them bad trade deals—has prompted the closing of sixty thousand U.S. factories.31
Experts have written an array of textbooks and academic papers explaining the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Some say it’s NAFTA offering cheap overseas labor; others say its automation displacing the American workers. While these theories all have some merits, there’s a perspective that the experts inevitably miss because they’ve never looked through the eyes of factory workers.
“They say robotics and technology are going to take over,” Brian sneered. “I don’t buy that. I’ve seen or heard percentages as high as 85 percent of factory jobs are going to be eliminated because of robotics. Impossible! Especially in a sheet-metal shop.” It’s as if the so-called experts and pontificating pundits had no grasp of the complexity of Brian’s job.
Brian went on to explain a manufacturing procedure called “stack up.” “There’s plus or minus 3,000 allowances on this part, 3,000 allowances on that part. If each one of them is just a slight bit out, but still within spec by the time you get to the end of it, you’re talking 10 or 12 thousandths out [of spec],” he said. “Will a robot be able to perform the tasks you need to do now? Chances are, no. Not on a consistent basis.”
To put it simply, I was lost. Burner assembly? Tolerance? Variance? I felt like I was in a foreign physics class. It was like Brian was speaking a different language—and he was: the language of manufacturing. As Brian explained his job in vivid detail, I gathered that he was not only highly skilled in a niche area but he was also extremely intelligent. He spoke a language that not a single one of my co-panelists on CNN could speak. Pundits throw around fancy words like “automation,” but did they have any appreciation for the complexity of Brian’s job?
Not only do many in the talking class fail to understand the work of a manufacturer, some actively put down the non–college-educated lifestyle. T.J. told me that he had just seen Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs make this very point. “Plumbers. Handymen. They’re portrayed as dumb [on TV], like Tim Allen, and Dan Conner [John Goodman’s character] on Roseanne,” T.J. said. Rowe posited that the disparaging media portrayal of blue-collar workers produces a culture that doesn’t respect these jobs and pushes kids away from them at a young age. “It’s really a vicious cycle,” T.J. explained. “High schools aren’t pushing those vocational classes no more, like welding, woodshop, fabrication classes. You don’t see that no more.”
And that’s not always for the better. When T.J. grew up, there were shop classes in school. “We learned how to build stuff,” T.J. said. “You look at the kids nowadays, all they know how to operate is their tablet or phone. They don’t know how to build anything.”
“Zero problem-solving skills,” Brian added.
T.J. and Brian are workers at heart, and hard workers at that. Even so, Brian admits that you have to get on board with technology. “The unions are so hard against it; they don’t realize they’re slitting their own throats,” Brian said. Automation may cost some jobs on the front end, he explained, but when you learn the process, you open yourself up to new skill sets. The day after Trump came to Carrier, the head of UTC announced a $16 million investment in automation—a worrisome development for T.J. and Brian.32 “If we’re going to have robots in here, who are we going to have run them?” T.J. asked. Why not train Carrier workers to move into these new roles?
Beyond technological change, T.J. and Brian also cite corporate greed as a reason for disappearing jobs. To many corporations, employees are faceless numbers, on the backs of whom big-time CEOs amass empires. An erosion of appreciation now plagues companies in even the smallest of ways. “When my dad worked at FedEx when I was a kid, man, they used to have so many things for you,” T.J. reminisced. “Events. Christmas dinners. Bonuses. At Carrier now, you don’t get nothing. You don’t get nothing.”
“Yeah, I remember we used to get a turkey at Thanksgiving, and then that stopped,” Brian added.
“We used to have cookouts for the Indy 500 in May,” T.J. said. “They’d have a big tent out there, and the [Carrier] race car out there, and all the supervisors would give people hot dogs. They don’t do that no more.”
Brian’s daughter works at an apartment complex. It’s not a billion-dollar corporation, just a tiny company with a tight budget. “She got a $500 Christmas bonus. A nice little gift bag with stuff in it,” Brian marveled. “And I’m thinking, ‘Damn, we don’t even get a damn turkey.’ ”
Now, please don’t misunderstand. It’s not that Brian and T.J. demand a whole bunch of gratuitous handouts. That’s not in the DNA of workers like them. The slow elimination of acts of appreciation is a symptom of a bigger problem: nothing seems to matter to twenty-first-century corporations except their bottom lines.
“It started in the eighties when you let Wall Street get in all these government officials’ pockets,” T.J. said. “That’s where stuff started. The greed started, where it was just all about money.”
“So you’re like a cog in the wheel, not a human being?” I asked him.
“Yeah, you’re just a number to them,” T.J. said.
“There’s a problem. It’s not the United States anymore. It’s corporate America,” Brian offered. “These special interest groups aren’t negotiating anything in my interest, his interest, or your interest. It’s about whose back they can scratch.” Brian said to just look at UTC’s board of directors and you’ll see the kinds of political affiliations they have. One member of the board is a retired general. What does he know about running a company or air-conditioning manufacturing? Not much. He’s there for one reason and one reason alone: to lobby for U.S. military contracts.
“Nothing’s about the people,” Brian said. “Everything’s about shareholders, about the CEO. The CEO is making twenty-five times the average worker, and yet they want to blame us? We make too much money?” Brian explained that UTC just bought out a board member for a whopping $195 million.33
“It was a lot for him to walk away,” T.J. said.
“Just for him to go away.”
“But yet they need $65 million to stay in Indianapolis?” T.J. asked.
Trump succeeded in capturing more union workers than any Republican presidential candidate in the last three decades because he elevated the sentiments expressed by T.J. and Brian. Just before the 2016 crop of Republican primary candidates entered the race, Vice President Joe Biden warned a group of union leaders that Republicans are “willing to sacrifice your needs on the altar of ideology . . . They act as if you are the problem, as if you caused the recession.”34 Biden alleged that Republicans had “dismissive contempt” for unions.35 However, the Vice President had no idea that Trump was waiting in the wings.
Three months later, Trump declared his candidacy and offered an anti-trade, pro-worker message, foreign to the Republican establishment but primed for the union rank and file. Unlike many of his predecessors, Trump acknowledged that hardworking union workers were getting a raw deal, and he vowed to rectify that.
Brian and T.J. don’t place all of the blame on the company for jobs disappearing. They recognize the blameworthiness in some of their coworkers. Brian noted that on any given day Carrier operates with 20 percent to 30 percent absenteeism because of FMLA—a Clinton-era program that allows an individual to take up to twelve weeks off every year.36 Although the program was designed to assist new parents or gravely ill individuals, workers now take off for “stress” or “migraines,” and the company cannot refuse you.
“So if I come into work and see I have a hard job today, and I don’t want to be here, I can go to medical and say, ‘Hey, I’m stressed today,’ and leave,” Brian pointed out.
“And they have to let you leave. They can’t say no,” T.J. added. “So many people just take advantage of it and abuse it.” Brian and T.J. told me that coworkers will take FMLA and then gloat about it on Facebook.
“They’ll leave early on FMLA and you’ll see ‘Oh, I’m at the mall’ or ‘Check in. I’m getting my nails done,’ ” T.J. remarked.
“Or ‘I’m at the park’ or ‘It’s such a nice day, I’m chilling at the pool,’ Brian said. And he would think, Didn’t you leave on FMLA?”
“So many people abuse it. This past week has been rough,” T.J. recalled. “And really that’s what’s frustrating.”
“We have a second chance,” Brian said. “But it’s like they don’t care about anyone else. It’s just selfish. ‘I don’t care whether I cost everybody else their job. I don’t feel like being here today’ . . . During football season, Tuesdays are hell. For some reason everybody’s had their issues on Tuesday after Monday Night Football.”
T.J. explained that HR uses a point system for absenteeism. Mondays are three points against the worker, whereas every other day is just two points, and yet Mondays are the worst days for absenteeism. “Of course everyone’s there on payday on Thursday,” T.J. remarked. Absenteeism and abuse of FMLA has gotten so intense that HR now claims that FMLA must stand for the “Friday and Monday Leave Act.” “What’s sad is we’ve all lost our jobs and still there’s people that just don’t give a shit,” T.J. said.
Brian noted that the unions enable this kind of behavior. “If you feel the necessity to cuss out a supervisor, you don’t deserve a job,” Brian asserted. “If you tell people you don’t care, well, then [they should] fire you. If you’re sitting at 30 something points on an 18 point system, you don’t deserve your job, but the union will fight to get your job back.”
It’s this kind of attitude of self-responsibility that motivated Brian to vote for Trump. Brian seeks accountability in the workplace, not excuses and willful blindness. Brian described one guy at Carrier named Harold Gillespie. Harold has had forty-plus years at Carrier, and he’s getting ready to retire. He’s had a kidney transplant and he’s half-blind. He’s also a diabetic who has had to have two to three toes cut off on each one of his feet. “He will outrun any employee I’ve got in my area or any employee in my plant. He runs his numbers day in and day out, and it’s unreal,” Brian said. “He’s one hell of a worker.”
By contrast, Harold’s nighttime counterpart is a young guy half Harold’s age. The buff, able-bodied worker is constantly complaining. He gets just half the numbers that Harold gets. “I mean, how could you look at yourself and say I’m running half the amount of a guy who’s missing two to three toes on each one of his feet and falls down a couple of times per week because of a balance thing from missing both of his big toes?” Brian asks, somewhat bewildered.
Brian and Harold have a lot in common: they’re both relentless workers. Brian tore his calf muscle in two right after Carrier announced that jobs were leaving. Despite the betrayal and his physical pain, Brian was out on the floor working when he did not have to. T.J. also broke his finger while working at Carrier. “I’ve bled in there. I’ve sweat in there,” he recalled. And yet the good work of Brian, Harold, and T.J. is undermined by lazy employees.
It’s a combination of bad trade deals, an unwillingness to adapt to automation, corporate greed, and worker irresponsibility that have caused a hemorrhaging of American manufacturing jobs. But while the solution is just as complex as the problem, there is one remedy that rests in the American spirit.
With Brian (left), and T.J. at Charbonos in Avon, Indiana. Courtesy of author’s collection
As T.J., Brian, and I discussed the fate of American manufacturing over dinner and a beer, a bystander who recognized me from CNN approached us. When the woman inquired about Carrier, T.J. explained that oftentimes production will move to Mexico for a while, and although the product comes back cheaper, quality goes down. Just that week, the Carrier factory had to temporarily cease production because of issues with Mexican-made control boards. Companies will move production back to the U.S. only to have the next guy in line that gets promoted say, “We’re paying too much to produce this. Let’s move this back to Mexico.”
“It’s a vicious cycle,” T.J. told the woman.
“I’ll pay more for USA made,” she said. “I care about that. I’ll pay more just to buy local in Hendricks County than to do something on Amazon.”
“I could never buy a foreign car,” T.J. said.
“Oh, no!” she retorted.
For now, T.J. and Brian are both safe in their Carrier manufacturing jobs, but it will never be the same. February 10, 2016, changed everything. For Brian, “it’s very hard, even still, to go to work and feel dedicated. I mean, you go to work and do your job, but it’s still not that good feeling if you do a little extra. It still feels like you’re going through the motions.” He described to me how he relished those days when everything went wrong that possibly could, but he found a way to make it right and get his product to the line without shutting it down. “Some of the best days I can say I had at work are also some of my worst days.” But not anymore. “I’m still doing it, but there’s no passion in it,” he said.
“It’s hard to come in and put in 110 percent,” T.J. said.
“It’s like a marriage,” Brian said.
“You know it’s ending,” T.J. continued the analogy.
“The love is just gone. It’s over, and you’re just going through the motions.”
“You’re together for the kids. Because the company’s already stabbed you in the back once,” T.J. said.
Management is still breathing down their necks. Workers are expected to give 110 percent, but the feeling of having been betrayed lingers. “There’s some days you’re shooting screws and you might have one that’s in there crooked and you’re, like, ‘Well, it’s not going in my house,’ ” T.J. said. “You know I don’t like having that thought, but there are some days.”
Despite a loss of passion for their jobs, T.J. and Brian still manage to add some life to their work. “Me and T.J., we sit and play cards together every day,” Brian told me. “We play euchre at lunch together every day. He’s anti-Trump. I’m pro-Trump,”
“But we get along,” T.J. added.
“We might dig at each other here or there, but it’s never the typical ‘Hey, man, you’re an idiot.’ It’s nothing like that.”
“It’s not hard to get along with people you have disagreements with.”
“Common respect,” Brian emphasized.
Two hardworking factory workers. Two different political parties. United in betrayal.