Where jobs are plentiful, Trump supporters want better

Workers dehydrate at recreational vehicle factories

ELKHART, Indiana, June 20, (RTRS): While many politicians, including President Donald Trump, say the United States desperately needs more manufacturing jobs, this small industrial city has more than enough.

The problem, for many workers here, is one of quality, not quantity.

That’s the case with Brandon Seitz. The rail-thin 32-year-old worked for 12 years on an assembly line at one of the local recreational-vehicle factories that have made Elkhart the RV Capital of the World. The job, Seitz says, nearly wrecked his health.

His pay, as for assembly workers at most RV factories, was a combination of a low hourly wage and a large production bonus, referred to as the “piece rate.” The frantic rush to meet output targets — and thus earn bonuses — made it easier for accidents to happen, he says. During his first year, he tore tendons in his knee when a steel frame hit him.

And then there was the heat. Most RV factories lack air conditioning. “I was constantly sweating,” he says. “There were days in summer when I drank two-and-a-half gallons of water and was still dehydrated.” In 2014, surgeons cut into his back and used a laser to break up and remove a large kidney stone that they said was caused by dehydration.

That’s when Seitz vowed never to work on an RV production line again. “The money is good,” he says, but “it’s just so hard on your body.”

A manufacturing revival was well under way in Elkhart by the time Trump began promising one during last year’s presidential campaign. During the Great Recession of 20082009, the local unemployment rate hit 20 percent, among the highest in the country. It has since recovered to a seasonally unadjusted 1.9 percent, its lowest in nearly two decades and far better than the national rate, an adjusted 4.3 percent.

The RV industry accounts for a big chunk of that improvement. Local officials estimate that half of jobs here are related to manufacturing and that half of those are linked to RVs. Today, Elkhart County and the surrounding region produce 85 percent of US-made RVs. Unit sales last year were the highest since the 1970s.

Judging by such numbers, times are good in Elkhart — not the sort of place to find those white, working-class voters who, feeling forgotten by the political class, helped propel Trump to the presidency.

Yet, people here voted two-to-one for Trump, more so than even in deeply Republican Indiana as a whole. And a few months into the new administration, despite the investigations into alleged Russian involvement in the election, and despite the president’s failure so far to get much of the agenda he ran on enacted, support for Trump is strong among local workers, including many Reuters interviewed who stayed away from the polls last November.

Seitz is one of the more recent converts. He didn’t vote in the November election. He says he wasn’t sure whom to believe. Now, he says, he would probably vote for Trump in the future. “He’s already living up this promise to bring work back from Mexico,” Seitz says.

He and many other workers interviewed for this article don’t want more jobs like the ones readily available in Elkhart. They want jobs with steady, predictable pay for the long haul — the kinds of jobs that decades ago helped build and sustain a solid middle class in Elkhart and across the industrial Midwest. And they blame immigration and the forces of globalization for reshaping the work that is available.

“I really think (Trump) can make America great again,” says Mary Swihart, 28, who voted for Trump. She works in an RV factory here owned by Thor Industries Inc, the nation’s largest RV maker, where she earns about $15 an hour stringing wires into harnesses that go into the vehicles.

She especially likes Trump’s pledges to halt illegal immigration and speed up deportations. Like many workers here, she believes that immigrants are willing to work for less than nativeborn workers and don’t complain as readily about bad conditions.

“If we sent them back, it would mean more jobs for legal Americans,” she says.

Elkhart County’s population is about 75 percent non-Hispanic white. About 30,000 Hispanics live in the county, according to Census data, forming a small but fast-growing community.

Robert Warren, a former Census Bureau demographer who is now a senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, has estimated the number illegal immigrants in states and counties across the US By his calculation, about 9,400 illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico, live in Elkhart County, and of those illegal immigrants who work, 67 percent have some type of factory or production job.

Officials at Thor and other local RV makers say they don’t pay immigrants less and don’t hire undocumented workers. “There’s no difference in pay,” says Jeffery Tryka, a Thor spokesman. “Every one of our workers is required to provide documentation that they’re here legally — so they’re all paid the same.”

As for the work, Thor and other producers say their plants are safe, despite the hectic pace. “There’s no question it’s a physically demanding job,” Tryka says.

Ken Julian, Thor’s vice president of administration and human resources, says the industry is constantly improving the ergonomics of assembly line jobs to make tasks easier and safer for employees of any age. To deal with the heat, he says, they also keep water or other drinks on hand, and “if we see a 100-degree heat index, we’ll shut the plant.”

Industry executives say the bonus system is popular with workers, since it allows them to earn more money in less time.

Attractive or not, jobs in the RV industry are emblematic of the kind of work that is increasingly the best option for blue-collar workers. The industry is prone to booms and busts, as wells as shorter-term fluctuations throughout the year, which can mean frequent layoffs, though that hasn’t been a problem amid the current production boom.

The frenetic pace of piece work means many people stay at the bestpaying assembly line jobs only for as long as they can stand it or until their health or stamina falters. When they no longer can, these workers often move into lower-paying jobs.

That’s what Seitz did after his kidneystone surgery. He now works in the service department at Jayco, an RV maker recently acquired by Thor. He figures he puts in about 48 hours a week, compared to the 35 hours he averaged on the assembly lines — and his weekly takehome pay is $500 less. But he much prefers working at his own pace and interacting with customers.

His former employer, Forest River Inc, part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Workers jump from job to job in search of better conditions or to maximize their earnings before the next downturn. At many RV factories, the annual turnover rate is 100% or higher — meaning a number equal to the total workforce or more is replaced each year. Much of the churn occurs as the companies struggle to fill the same lower-end, entry positions over and over again.

RV workers are among the “anxiously employed,” says Andrew Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics in Fort Wayne. Trump appealed to these workers by saying that “You’re working hard, but you’re still not doing as well as you’d like” and that there was a time in the past when their lives — and the jobs available to them — were better.

That message resonated in Elkhart, once home to a more diverse industrial base that provided steady middle-class paychecks. Before it was the RV capital, Elkhart was known as the Band Instrument Capital of the World for the dozens of musical-instrument factories that operated here. Most of that work has moved to China.

Elkhart also had a huge pharmaceuticals company. Miles Laboratories Inc invented the diabetic test strip here and once had Elkhart factories churning out everything from Flintstones vitamins to Alka-Seltzer tablets. Germany’s Bayer AG bought Miles in 1978 and eventually moved everything away. All that’s left is a roadside marker honoring the test strip.

What’s happened in Elkhart has occurred across industrial America. The average wage on US factory floors dropped below the average for all private-sector workers in 2006, and the gap has widened since. Manufacturing workers now earn an average of $20.79 an hour, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, below the $22 an hour for all workers. Service workers, meanwhile, pushed ahead of their factory-floor counterparts in 2008 and now earn an average of $21.79 an hour.

A 2016 study by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that a third of production workers in the US earn so little that they qualify for some form of government assistance, such as food stamps. Many of these workers weren’t putting in enough hours to earn more, the study found, but about a third worked at least 35 hours a week.

Stacy Curtis says she voted for Trump because she liked what he said about bringing back “good” jobs and for taking a hard line on immigration. Curtis dropped out of school at age 16 to work in a van-customization shop. She later landed a sought-after job at one of the town’s musical-instrument factories. It was a union job, with good pay, and it was prestigious for the skills needed to fashion thin metal into trumpets and trombones.

In 2006, workers at Curtis’s factory went out on strike after the company, the Vincent Bach division of ConnSelmer Inc, demanded changes in work rules that would allow it to pay lower wages to compete with Chinese rivals. The strike ended after three years, when workers severed their links to the United Auto Workers and accepted the company’s offer. Curtis didn’t go back to making trombones.