Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
THE LAST SHIFT
Carrier made air conditioners and other equipment at a factory in Indianapolis for 60 years. When it announced it was moving to Mexico, US president Donald Trump stepped in. A year later, this is what remains.
This US factory was going to move to Mexico. Then US President Donald Trump intervened. We see how much he helped the community.
Factories have no windows. It’s a mind-yourown-business kind of architectural gesture.
You could stand on South Girls School Road on the far western edge of Indianapolis, under the slate-cloud ceiling of an Indiana winter, and watch the sizeable Carrier air-conditioner plant for days on end, and you’d never see a thing that was going on inside. You’d be out there looking at the end of things. The end of a half-century’s worth of work in fan assembly for commercial and residential airconditioning. The end of work, or a certain kind of work. Labour. Assembly. Manufacture. You’d be looking for the sense of what was lost over there when the company decided that they could do this work better somewhere else. Or maybe something was gained. Maybe something really was saved by the president when he claimed he protected the Carrier workers in the weeks before he took office. You try to keep an open mind out on South Girls School Road.
You’d come to know the fingery reach of chainlink fence surrounding the place. You would learn all the signage demarcating Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies Corporation (UTC). You’d come to know the comings and goings of the vehicles still running between here and the United Technologies Electronic Controls (UTEC) – another UTC company – facility 168 km away in Huntington, the other plant affected by layoffs. Up there, 700 more manufacturing jobs will be lost, the last of them in just a few more weeks.
‘It’s almost impossible to explain what they did to our membership,’ a union representative says.
When a large company decides it just can’t go on another day manufacturing its goods in the US, things get messy. The company comes up with a plan, and then announces it with euphemistic corporate-speak (‘separations,’ not ‘ layoffs’), and they try to execute it with no fanfare. It happens all the time. It’s just that this one got caught in the political cross hairs of a presidential election, in part because you had an incoming president who really wanted to make ‘Made in the USA’ one of his bankable causes, and his vice president happened to be the outgoing governor of the state of Indiana, and the Carrier stuff was all going on right about then – so, they picked it. They made a spectacle, announced that they had stepped in and said, ‘No way!’ and saved the jobs.
That was late 2016, early 2017. It’s now getting to the middle of 2018. What do things look like down on South Girls School Road, and in the rest of the small universe these layoffs have touched?
Be clear: There are still jobs at the fan-coil assembly plant in Indianapolis. The workers who survived the layoffs, mostly the seniormost members of Carrier’s Indianapolis assembly process, are there. These are the jobs President Trump claims to have saved. About 700. ‘ There were five production lines there before they made the announcement,’ the local union head says. ‘ There are three now.’
According to the union the workers belong to, these jobs are being shifted to Carrier’s furnace lines. Fan-coil assembly has been completely shut down. The union contract for the workers involved runs through 2020. [ Editor’s note: We contacted Carrier, UTEC, and UTC repeatedly and persistently in reporting this story. We asked for facts and interviews, and also requested to visit all the facilities being discussed in this story. They declined most requests, but did provide us limited statistics. The story is based primarily on visits to Indianapolis; Huntington, Indiana; and Monterrey, Mexico; as well as interviews with union leadership and current and former employees in both countries.]
Some mornings, around 11:50, one of the remaining workers jogs over to Sully’s, a bar across the street. Sully’s is mostly just a pool hall with nested flat-screens and a pretty standard cast of American and Irish beers, and an unexpected all-you-can-eat Vietnamese lunch buffet. You might approach the lunch runner and ask, How is it up at the plant? You’ll identify yourself. Your concern. But the lunch runner will just look at you, put up his hands. ‘No,’ he’ll say, waving his hands in front of his ears. ‘No, no, no, no.’
Tammy, the hard-edged daytime bartender at Sully’s, will remind you not to bother the customers, especially the Carrier customers. Sully’s wants to keep what’s left of the lunch business. ‘It’s been hard on them, too,’ Tammy says of the workers who remain.
THE HUNTINGTON FACTORY
Huntington, Indiana, looks paused in the moment that New England met the frontier. There is something very Western about the three-story facades of buildings that line the street. The pace is unhurried, and the parking free. Past the downtown strip, the shuttered shopping centre and fast-food restaurants, a four-lane road leads out to the city’s industrial park and the UTEC factory.
There are only a handful of empty spots between the cars and trucks that fill the UTEC plant parking lot. The plant here isn’t emptied out yet. It’s said to be ‘transitioning’. The last floor workers are busy moving machinery out and manufacturing the last chips before the place is staffed only by salaried workers doing things like research and design, and customer service – not making. By the middle of 2018, the line will have been shut down.
In the foyer, a plaque on the wall celebrates the building’s environmental friendliness, LEED Gold- certified in 2011. A poster shows a few hundred employees gathered in front of this very same building, wearing matching shirts, waving toward the camera. The script beneath their feet reads, ‘ UTEC welcomes you.’
THE UNION BOSS
United Steelworkers Local 1999 sits adjacent to a railroad switch on an obscure side street, in a neighbourhood crammed full of single- f loor, singlefamily homes propped up and solid on their waist-high foundations. No one’s in the yards or on the porches in the morning. A Hispanic synagogue in a storefront by the tracks, and a restaurant a block away, stand not quite open, not quite shut down, the restaurant with a handwritten sign pinned to the door that just reads, ‘Monday.’ Today is Thursday.
The broken glass door f lops open to the world if you don’t wedge it shut behind you. Inside, in a conference room just off the honest-to- God Union Meeting Hall – Novilon floor, caged windows, folding chairs, and bulletin boards pinned willy-nilly with notices – sits Robert James, 59 years old, the chief of the United Steelworkers Local, wearing a dinged-up Members Only jacket, flannel shirt, jeans and boots. He’s quiet as a pond.
James worked in materials over at Carrier for 19 years before taking over union leadership last year right in the middle of the layoffs and the Trump thing. He lights a cigarette and stares down every question. James says the union was not given notice in February 2016 before the announcement that the Carrier factory would close and every member was about to be laid off. ‘No warning. It was like a punch in the jaw. Direct,’ he says. He pinches his hand on his chin, repeats himself, ‘Di-rect.’ The one word sounds like two, something like ‘Die. Wrecked’.
What about the meeting with Trump later that year? Were you offered any role in that? James shakes his head. ‘ There was a lot of misunderstanding that went on about the day when the president- elect announced that 1 100 jobs had been saved,’ he says. ‘Every worker in the plant went in there knowing there were 1 100 union jobs at the plant. Total. So they hear him say, “1 100 jobs,” every one of them thinks: “My job is safe”. And we heard it with them. But soon, we knew that was wrong.’ Trump had included the
THE MAYOR
Mayor Brooks Fetters fills his chair. He’s an imposing man with a sober expression, as if he were listening with his eyes. The front of a Lincoln MKS sedan spans the wall of his office, the distinct beaver- tooth nose pushing the body panel slightly up so that it points up towards the ceiling. The bonnets are made right here in Huntington.
A table is covered with other products made in Huntington County: Ecolab soaps, the lid of a Huntington grill, the shell of a Glade plug-in. Products no longer made in Huntington have a place beneath the table: an ice-cream tub, a car-wash roller, asbestos brake pads. The next item added to that pile will be the chips from United Technologies Electronic Controls. A letter to the mayor from UTEC described the transition like this: ‘ 738 employees in total will be affected over time… The separations are expected to be permanent.’
At the Life Church Café of Hope, two rows of pilly blue-fabric chairs and ten or so rows of orange folding chairs fill a sort of conference room off a cafe, which itself leads off a church. Before 7 am, it is already standing room only for the mayor’s State of the City address. Local businessmen chat, a representative from Congressman Jim Banks’s office stands stiff in her skirt suit, and firemen and police chiefs lean in the back. The chatter quiets as Steve Kimmel, executive director of the Huntington County Chamber of Commerce, introduces Mayor Fetters. He walks to centre stage, standing in front of a folding table that serves here as an improvised podium for him.
He tells the crowd of about 100 that there is a lot to celebrate in Huntington. Despite the layoffs, unemployment is below 4 per cent. There is the new dog park, and the new pump track for BMX bikes, and business is growing in the northeast. A slide on the screen behind him reads: ‘ Big Challenges of 2017’.
‘ UTEC was a kick in the gut,’ he says. Among the challenges facing mayors all across America – a fire downtown, a growing opioid crisis – UTEC is still a purely Huntington challenge. Mayor Fetters commends the fire department and community leaders for tackling the first two challenges, but calls upon the city as a whole to help with the third: ‘ We need to continue to come alongside friends and neighbours affected by this trauma and help them find a hopeful, productive path forward.’
THE MEXICO FACTORY
In Monterrey, the spring air is sweet with f lowers. In the city, sunlight falls in yellow panels on the central square in the early morning. But the light is bluer at the western edge of town, where the Carrier fan-coil assembly has been relocated, surrounded by miles of empty desert. Carrier sits away from the main road, so that at the end of their shift, Carrier workers mostly walk a few hundred metres toward two semi- official bus stops, which stand unadorned next to the road. Simple, sandy low spots with no kerb – you wouldn’t know they were bus stops if you didn’t watch for a while. And you wouldn’t know they were Carrier workers unless you saw them exiting the plant. No logos or name tags here. Like so many working Mexicans, they wear T-shirts with writing on them – Lakers shirts, soccer jerseys, shirts advertising a local hardware store, or something about bowling. Otherwise, it’s jeans and boots. Almost everyone has a backpack, which makes them look something like students. Except they do not talk.
They say they don’t go to bars after work, or even restaurants. There is nowhere they gather. Around here, they say, Mexicans are inside on Saturdays, and at night. There is nowhere to meet. ‘ I go home after work,’ says one 29-year- old Carrier employee. ‘Or I go to my other job. That’s all.’
Some local plants have buses leaving from their grounds at the end of a shift, but Carrier staff ride the public buses to distant villages in either direction. There are a lot of buses, so no one waits long. Approach them now, at the first respite after a ten-hour shift, and they find you puzzling.
‘ Why would anyone want to know what goes on in there?’ They ask. ‘It is work.’
They have phones, but don’t look at them incessantly. No one uses earphones or reads. They’re moving, engaged in the work of their one-to-two-hour commute.
As the light begins to fade, the rectangles of sun are replaced by a sepia tone as the light filters through the post-industrial air. Light poles and charger panels reach upwards. Telephone lines crisscross the sky. Street lights lighting the drive to Carrier flick to life just before dinnertime. It’s not all ugly, though. There is a hue of exhaustion to the twilight in Monterrey.
The guy we’ve hired as a fixer is a young entrepreneur educated in sociology at a University of Texas. He likes the dust.
Despite the layoffs, unemployment in Huntington is below 4 per cent.
He credits the condition to the presence of ‘particulates produced in the production of cement.’ This is fair, he says. ‘ These aren’t toxins we are breathing in. They are not chemicals. This is stone that was already here. Having it in the air, it is something that tells us there are jobs here. It is good.’
Monterrey is the ninth-largest city in Mexico, and its third-largest metropolitan area. Carrier owns multiple facilities across the city, but even so, it’s hardly a dominant corporate presence.
Monterrey is without question an industrial centre, and home to production facilities for dozens of international corporations, including Nokia, Siemens, GE, Caterpillar, LG, Dell, Samsung, Daewoo, Whirlpool, Kia, Sony, and a score of Mexican companies, too.
A group of Carrier workers sits in a roadside lunch tent eating pork tacos. They wear the company logo on their chest. Follow one of the public buses that a group of workers take to their homes, and you come to the expansive cement village of García, where the Saturday flea market is set up alongside a fenced gully. Many Mexicans are outside, selling clothes, kitchen items, work gloves, shoes, rolls of paper towels, and the like at folding tables. At one table, a woman says her brother has worked at Carrier for several months. He loves the job, she says. They hold on to people.
According to Robert James, Carrier informed the Steelworkers union that the average Carrier worker in Monterrey makes about $3 (R38) an hour, plus some benefits and production bonuses, many of which commence after 11 months of continuous employment. The most common official estimate of the pay package to these workers is nearly $6 (R76) an hour, inclusive. Pay at the time of the shutdown announcement at Carrier’s plant in Indianapolis was $20.31 (R255),
according to James, with benefits pushing the total compensation to $36 (R450) an hour.
Some Mexican workers are still unperturbed by the wages reported at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis. They realise it is several times the scale of pay in Monterrey, but they are fuzzy on the specifics.
‘Clothing costs so much in the United States,’ a worker at Cemex, a cement plant quarrying in the Monterrey valley, says. ‘And food. When I heard the numbers – so much, so much dollars – I feel they must fear for their jobs more than we do. It really scares the heart, you know?’
On a later afternoon stop in a store in the village of Villa De García- Casco, the shopkeeper says that there are many people in the neighbourhood who work or have worked at Carrier. His son used to work there. He lives nearby, the shopkeeper says; maybe he would speak to us. Twenty minutes later, the son, 34, shows up, sheepish and sleepy from a weekend nap. Yes, he’d worked at Carrier for nine months, he says. ‘I was working in Gearbox Assembly A, Carrier Commercial. It was a good place to work. I got a good wage. The work environment was calm. I also worked in different areas of the plant over that time.’ He valued the job, he explains. And he felt that the company was fair to him. He doesn’t know what Americans earned at the Carrier plant up in Indianapolis. We tell him. ‘ Is it really $40 an hour?’ He professes not to care. It does not seem unfair to him. ‘I have only heard about that.’ He left Carrier of his own accord, and is now an electrical assembler at another plant. ‘I went to technical school for three years and I left because since I studied more, I get a better wage than I did at Carrier. About 100 pesos more a day.’ That’s five dollars. Enough to make a difference.