The Lords of Easy Money by Christopher Leonard

Author:Christopher Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Looking back, Rexnord employees would say that the first suspicious thing they noticed was that the company installed new security cameras in the Indianapolis factory. The cameras went up over a weekend. It seemed odd. Curious employees were told that it was just a security measure.

Feltner was in the factory when employees were told to gather for an announcement. Again, there was a strange detail about this. Half of the employees were asked to go to a loading dock at the back of the building, and half were asked to go to a spot in front of the building. They didn’t know why the company would want to split everyone up.

Feltner joined his half of the coworkers and they stood around while a Rexnord manager got up in front of them to give a short, unsentimental speech. Rexnord had decided to close the ball-bearings factory and move its production to Monterrey, Mexico. The union later learned that employees in Mexico would earn about $3 an hour and that closing the American plant would save Rexnord roughly $15 million a year. The impact of this news was immediate and severe for Feltner and his coworkers. They didn’t live in a world where someone could move fluidly from one well-paying job to the next. Getting laid off was more akin to falling over the side of a cliff. They had been on a relatively high plateau, and the odds that they would ever be that high again seemed very small. Feltner had fought hard to join Rexnord, and he had fought hard for a reason. He knew how rare and valuable the job was. With one meeting, the three hundred jobs at Feltner’s factory disappeared. “It rocks your world. It really does. People were pissed. You just had your entire life shit on,” Feltner said.

The employees did what they could to fight the decision. They gave interviews to the local television news cameras. They even tried to pressure political leaders to do something, but that was a long shot. Labor unions had once been political power brokers in American life, but now they were just a marginal interest group that garnered scattered media attention. But there did seem to be one reason for hope: 2016 was a presidential election year. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, was campaigning in a strange way for a Republican. Trump was the first major party presidential nominee in decades to argue—passionately, belligerently, profanely, and repeatedly—that it was more important to keep jobs inside the United States than it was to earn maximum profits for shareholders. Trump had latched on to another, larger case of layoffs in Indianapolis: A company called Carrier announced it was closing its Indianapolis plant, eliminating about 1,400 jobs, and moving 700 of them to Mexico. Trump made Carrier the villain of his campaign speeches and promised to punish Carrier or any company that moved jobs overseas by imposing taxes or tariffs on it.

Feltner supported Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, who was the governor of Indiana.

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