American Made by Farah Stockman

Author:Farah Stockman [Stockman, Farah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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WALLY WATCHED THE assembly cells he’d perfected get taken apart and loaded into trucks bound for Mexico. The announcement that the factory was going to close had eliminated his role. There was no need to find efficiencies in assembly lines that were moving away.

After years of eliminating the physical distance that workers had to walk in between stations in the plant, the stations were now being separated by 150 miles and an international border. Some of the parts for the roller bearings would be produced in Mexico and shipped across the border to McAllen, Texas. That contradicted everything that Wally had learned about efficiency and waste. Workers couldn’t simply walk from “grinding” to “heat treat” to solve a problem or ask for a change. He had no idea how the new system could work. But it wasn’t his job to care.

To Wally, it underscored how insignificant he was to the company executives. “To the people that’s way up there, we look like little ants down here,” he told me. “What do they know about who we are and what we can do?”

But Wally didn’t wallow in bitterness. He kept his eye on the dream of Wally Gator’s Woodfire BBQ. After the company closed down the cafeteria, he brought in a slow cooker and sold pulled pork sandwiches out of his office.

Wally’s blackness gave him a certain psychological advantage over the white men who were traumatized by watching their jobs disappear. Black people were more accustomed to adversity, joblessness, and unemployment.

Wally tried to keep people’s spirits up, cracking jokes and offering prayers. In the rift between his friends on the bowling team, he remained as neutral as Switzerland. He didn’t volunteer to train, as so many of his black friends had, but neither did he bad-mouth the trainers, as his white friends did.

Wally was skeptical that the Mexicans would be able to do the same job with just a few weeks of training. But he didn’t wish to see them fail. “I kind of admire their work ethic,” he said of the Mexicans. “They don’t owe nobody an apology. If I were them, I wouldn’t apologize.”

Gently, Wally tried to prod his white union brothers into thinking about the future. One night at a union event, Leonard was asked what he planned to do after the factory closed. He had no answer. Wally cut in and answered for him. “Make it,” Wally said, placing a hand firmly on Leonard’s shoulder. “Start from scratch. That’s what you’re going to do.”

Wally found it odd that some of the white men seemed more intent on punishing the trainers than on figuring out their next move. He referred to them as the “woe-is-me” crowd. Woe-is-me people begged Donald Trump to save the plant on social media. Woe-is-me men made snide remarks about the Mexicans at the smoke shack.

Once, as Wally strolled through a deserted corner of the plant, he caught a woe-is-me man in the act of sabotaging a machine. The man froze, undoubtedly wondering whether Wally would turn him in.

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