Media elites have missed the damage caused by free trade, and how millions felt betrayed by Democrats

Episode Summary

All of us are much more than what we do for a living. And yet, when we lose a job or have trouble finding another one, we feel like we’re missing something important.

But work is about more than just something to do with your time or to feed your family. For many people, work is an entry point into larger society. It’s how many of us meet friends and form families. It’s also often the only way that we come into prolonged contact with people who are different from us.

After the 2016 election, a lot of Mid-Atlantic media outlets sent journalists on expeditions to Midwestern diners to see how a man who lied constantly with a record of failed businesses and broken marriages was able to become president. Some of the stories that came out of those forays were good, but a lot of them just barely scratched the surface, or actually got things wrong.

In today’s episode, we feature Farah Stockman, a New York Times editorial writer who is also the author of a new book called American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears. It’s an important look at what work means for people, and what progressives missed about free trade, manufacturing, and globalization.

The unedited video of our conversation is below. A transcript of the edited audio follows.

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Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hey Farah. Thanks for being here today.

FARAH STOCKMAN: Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: I wanted to congratulate you on the book. It is a really good one. And I guess before we talk about some of the things that you say in it, maybe let’s discuss the format and why you decided to write it.

STOCKMAN: So I followed three people. Basically, I started reporting the book literally on election night, I was sent to Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, in Massachusetts, right near my house, actually.

I was part of this big reporting team that thought that we were gathering string to write about the historic election of the first female president. And of course you know how that went. The night turned upside down and everybody at Wellesley College was wondering, how could this have happened? How could so many millions of Americans have voted for a man who had not even served one day in government and made him president of the United States? How could that be?

I grew up in Michigan. I’m from the Rust Belt. So I started asking around why Donald Trump? And I kept hearing: ‘He’s gonna save my plant. He’s gonna save my factory. He’s going to bring the factories back.’ And that’s what made me decide to go to Indiana and follow workers at a factory that was moving to Mexico, which just a few weeks before the election, the bosses at that plant had announced that they were going to move to Monterey Mexico.

And right after the election, Trump tweeted about this plant, it’s called Rexnord. It was formerly Link-Belt and he tweeted: ‘No more. This company is viciously firing 300 workers.’ So it was really a microcosm of American politics. At that moment, all of these workers were hoping he was going to swoop in and he was feeding their dreams and a lot of the liberal friends of mine were saying things like: ‘Oh, get over it. The factories are never going to come back. How could they be so stupid to believe this guy?’ So anyway, I went to Indianapolis and followed three workers for seven months as the factory shut down. Shannon Mulcahy is a white woman, a single mother who had started off as a janitor at that plant and worked her way up to become a heat treat operator, which was one of the most dangerous and highly paid positions on the factory floor.

I also followed a Wally, a black guy who was very beloved at the plant. He was one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever met. He had a dream that he wanted to start a barbecue business after the factory closed. And I knew I wanted to follow him to see if he did it.

And I followed John Feltner, a white guy who was the union vice president. This was his second plant closing. And he was very angry, but also wasn’t surprised that it was closing.

And I wrote this in the New York Times in the fall of 2017 and I ended up writing a book and following them over the course of the Trump administration over four years to see where did they get jobs? What happened next? But also, how did they get their jobs in the first place? Who trained them? How did their jobs impact their sex lives? What did that job mean to them and what happened after it went away? That was the main thing I was looking at when I started to report the book.

SHEFFIELD: As I mentioned in the intro, some media outlets were criticized for just doing kind of shallow reporting of what’s going on in–

STOCKMAN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: In the Midwest. You were interested in this before that criticism came out, so I don’t think it influenced you, but on the other hand, where’s that, when did you feel like this deserved and longer form treatment than an article?

STOCKMAN: Yeah. I think a lot of us don’t understand what life is like in some of these places.

My big takeaway from the whole experience was that my economic reality, as a person who graduated from college and graduated from a prestigious college, my economic reality is so different than theirs. And I was a foreign correspondent before I started working for the New York Times. I spent a lot of time abroad and I know what it’s like to sit down and talk to people in another place and how long it takes before you can truly understand what their lives are like. Even getting a glimpse.

And it took me more than a year of hanging out with and interviewing and observing Shannon, Wally and John. It took me more than a year before I even had a clue of what their jobs meant to them, how it worked, how their personal finances worked. How did they get by, and what did it mean when the job disappeared?

I wanted to do the opposite of the usual political journalism, which is usually, a political reporter is dispatched to interview voters. You get one quote and you usually pick the quote that says what you already think. And if you’re lucky, it’s backed up by some opinion poll and boom, there’s a story. But that’s not how people’s lives, work. People’s opinions change over time. Their worldview is shaped by real lived experience.

And it doesn’t always conform to political categories. And every single one of us is a contradiction, politically. So Wally was a Democrat. He voted for Hillary Clinton, but he had a gun. Oh yeah he had a gun, and he really appreciated his right to own a gun. It was one of the things he was most thankful about because he’d served a stint in prison and a lot of people sign away their right to have a gun at that point. And he was so grateful that a lawyer had not let him do that.

So everybody had– John voted for Trump and yet when he talked, sometimes, he sounded like a Marxist. He was such a heavy duty, militant labor union guy. He believed in the union, it was the core of his identity. And when he talked about the world, it was labor and capital, labor and capital. That was the clear division. And you wouldn’t see those things if you didn’t spend enough time really not only talking to people, but interrogating their idea of the world until you felt like you understood.

SHEFFIELD: So now in the case of John, I found him to be interesting because he also was a former Democrat as well.

STOCKMAN: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: And he had a long heritage of, in his family, of being Democrats, but he felt like the Democrats had betrayed people like him, right?

STOCKMAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was one of my biggest takeaways. I went into the union hall. I interviewed him and his friend, Tim, and both of them had very similar histories. They were both the grandsons of coal miners. They came from coal miners, strong union families in Kentucky and Appalachia, that were once sort of the pillar of the Democratic Party.

They had believed so strongly in the Democratic Party, that John used to tell his kids, if a Democrat’s in office, old dad has a job. If a Democrat gets voted out old, dad’s out of work.

And his friend, Tim, told me: ‘My father would roll over in his grave if he knew I had ever cast a ballot for the Republicans, because he taught me that the Republicans were for the greedy corporations and the Democrats were for the working man. And you don’t cast a ballot for those greedy bastards,’ basically.

And yet they both told very similar stories about how, they just tuned out of politics. When Bill Clinton was in office, they supported him. They believed in him. They thought he was one of them.

And then, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and said, NAFTA is gonna improve working class jobs, increase the number of blue collar jobs. It’s gonna make Mexico rich, rich enough to buy our products and Mexicans aren’t going to be coming across the border anymore, looking for menial work, taking jobs from blue collar Americans.

They believed it. And then Bill Clinton did the China ascension to WTO, allowing China permanent trade with the United States. And those two things, and China’s entrance into the WTO was even bigger effect than NAFTA, but those two things really dramatically changed factory towns in these swing states.

Both John and Tim lost their jobs. Tim’s job went to Shanghai. And they started to believe that Clinton had gotten into bed with the corporations while nobody was looking. And they both said that they remember Ross Perot talking about the “giant sucking sound” that would happen when NAFTA was signed, the jobs would go to Mexico and we’d all hear this “giant sucking sound.”

And they said: ‘At the time, we thought Ross Perot was an idiot,’ and later they agreed: ‘Ross Perot was exactly right, we got sold out.’

So this was the first time I understood the depth of bitterness over NAFTA. There are people who– why is Sherrod Brown still an elected official in Ohio, even though he’s a Democrat? He’s there because he never voted for NAFTA. He never cast a ballot for any free trade agreement. That’s why they still elect him.

These are people who cast their ballots on trade. And so you can’t think of a worst candidate in 2016 than Bill Clinton’s wife. Bill Clinton is a man they _hate_ now– that they used to support but now they hate– because they blame him for the loss of factory jobs.

Political identity, a lot of times, at least for these people, it really boiled down to who puts food on your table, and do you have a job or not? And they just decided: ‘The Democrats have gotten into bed with the corporations.’ And so they didn’t really like Mitt Romney. He was the kind of corporate stiff that was sending jobs away.

They weren’t excited about him, but when Trump comes along, and Trump is talking about factory jobs, and Trump is talking about tariffs on China, they loved it. They have been waiting for someone to say that kind of thing for years, since Democrats moved to the center on those issues.

It was a real education to me, how much NAFTA was hated and how much that issue alone is what caused them to cast their ballots for Trump.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

STOCKMAN: I should say that their union initially endorsed Bernie Sanders, and when Bernie Sanders lost the nomination, most of the leadership voted for Hillary Clinton. They said, we’re going to hold our nose and vote for Hillary, but the membership voted for Trump.

SHEFFIELD: I think that’s an aspect about Donald Trump, his 2016 campaign in particular, that a lot of people missed, I think, in the political press. Not just with foreign trade, but also, in a lot of other ways, Donald Trump ran as a sort of left wing, old school Democrat. So like he said, he was gonna have a healthcare system that took care of everyone. He said he liked Canada’s socialized healthcare system. He said he was going to close the carried interest loophole. He said: ‘I know how the system works, they’ve been screwing everyone, well, I’m going to screw them on your behalf.’

People who don’t pay attention to politics compulsively, because they have better things to do perhaps, or they just have too many other things going on, if you have somebody who comes along and says to you: ‘I’m going to solve all your problems. And by the way, I’m going to bring back Merry Christmas.’ Why wouldn’t you vote for him is the better question.

STOCKMAN: The more I started to understand these steelworkers and read their, they had a newsletter at the time called _Steel Voice_. And if you read _Steel Voice_, it was just like a Trump rally speech. Like everything. It was almost like he had ripped his speeches from the _Steel Voice_, everything he was talking about on TPP, on prescription drug prices, on the way American workers were getting screwed by corporations, by globalization, by elites who didn’t care about the working class anymore. It was all there. It was all there. And it wasn’t entirely different than what Bernie Sanders was saying when it came to, when it came to globalization and the role that it played in hurting American workers.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, that’s true.

So we’ve talked about John here a little bit. Now you profiled two other people. Wally, who worked with the company to help them liaise between the union and the company. But unfortunately, he he died actually during the course of the reporting of your book. But can you talk about his story a little bit and his perspective?

STOCKMAN: Yeah. Wally was one of the most beloved people at the plant. He had so many friends. He really had one of the best jobs on the factory floor. He was the efficiencies czar, but they gave him lots of freedom to wander the plant to make things more efficient at the plant.

And he took it very seriously. He was a really hard worker when he had been on the assembly line, assembling bearings. He was the guy that always wanted to do more than the quota. So if the boss said: ‘I want a hundred of these bearings by lunchtime,’ Wally made sure to have 120, he was a really hard worker.

And in fact, he was such a hard worker than a lot of the other– his coworkers used to talk about him behind his back. Oh, he’s an Uncle Tom.

Or some of them would just say: ‘Hey, why are you working so hard? Because when you work that hard, so do I have to work that hard. And you’re being inconsiderate basically. If you’re showing them what we can produce, if we really push ourselves, you’re going to make them raise our rate. You’re gonna make them increase the amount we have to produce.’

So he was a model worker in a lot of ways. But he had as a youth, gotten in trouble with the law and and served a stint in prison. And so that was his reasoning. He was like: ‘I’m blessed to have this job. And I’m going to work as hard as I can because I was locked up and, I know what it’s like to be in the streets, selling drugs. This is my way out.’

He actually was able to really get on the path of a middle-class life because of that job that paid 24 — $25– an hour, benefits, and healthcare and all the rest.

His story really taught me that a job was like the difference between being taken care of by an institution that gave you access to all this stuff, it’s a life of paperwork. You get a 401k, you have insurance and all this protection that he hadn’t had as a younger man, he’d made a lot of money when he was a teenager as a drug dealer, and yet he didn’t have health insurance.

And he came from a neighborhood that had been once pretty stable and integrated. And his parents were, his father had had a degree in engineering from Purdue and had been in the management of a factory. And his parents had really tried to set him right. They went to church. They sent him to a Christian private school and all this stuff, but the neighborhood got worse and worse. And he just, he fell into a crowd of kids that were, bad influences were everywhere. And in the end, he gets a girl pregnant and decides: ‘the only way I can support her and the baby is to deal drugs.’

So he actually made more money than his father at the age of 15 dealing drugs on the corner. And it caused me to learn so much about what happens to a place when all of the most ambitious young men go to one industry. And it’s an industry that is illegal.

Wally’s story was fascinating because he was a very entrepreneurial guy. I met him at a steelworkers rally where he was giving a fiery speech about, we got to stand and fight for our jobs. They’re taking these jobs away from all of us. We got to stand shoulder to shoulder, black and white. We’re going to work together in this. We’re going to fight for our jobs.

Afterwards, I introduced myself and I thought he’d still be, angry and upset, like all the white workers that I had interviewed up until this point. And he was like: ‘You know what? Ain’t no use in being mad and crying about it. Me personally, I’m going to start a barbecue.’

And he handed me a business card. He had a plan. He was the only one I’d met that had a plan for what was going to happen after the factory closed. A lot of his white coworkers, were weeping, they were writing to Donald Trump every single day, begging him, begging Trump to save the plant Wally was like: ‘God did this. God intervened so that I could start my barbecue. And that’s what I’m going to do.’

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess one of the other aspects to Wally that you noted that I thought was an interesting observation is you said that: “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.”

Is that something that, given your own background, was that something that you already knew beforehand? Or was that something that you saw anew in this reporting?

STOCKMAN: I definitely saw it anew, I definitely saw it anew. I’m the child of two PhDs. My mother’s black, my father is white, but I grew up in a college town where everybody in my high school was on a path to college. I have cousins, I have a much larger family that’s experienced a lot of employment issues.

So I’ve seen it through them, but it wasn’t in my– Wally and following him made me understand it and confront it in a new way because the biggest mystery to me was: If I’m following these workers in this factory, and this factory is 40% black, and the white workers, they’re very receptive to Trump’s message about keeping factories here and the white workers are looking for a savior and they’re willing to cast a ballot for him because they want their factories saved. Why don’t the black workers who work in the same factory, have the same analysis? But they didn’t. Wally couldn’t stand Trump. And I think, part of it was that they worried that the message was racist.

So right after the factory bosses announced that it was closed and then the election happened, and then by December, they’re bringing in Mexican trainees to learn the machines. So what does John do? He goes through the whole plant saying: ‘Nobody train the Mexicans. Do not train them. If we don’t train them, we can maybe save our jobs. If nobody trains them, they can’t move the plant. So let’s stand together as a union and refuse, no matter what bonus they offer us, let’s say no. And whoever trains is no better than a scab.’ That was John’s message. And a lot of the black workers were like,

SHEFFIELD: And a scab is what?

STOCKMAN: A scab is somebody who crosses a picket line. Which in a union household, there’s no name you could be called that’s worse. That is the worst thing you could be called. And so fist fights started and friendships were ruined over this dispute over whether or not workers should train their Mexican replacements.

And a lot of the black guys heard that and said: ‘That’s racist. Saying that we shouldn’t train Mexicans is racist. A lot of them, that is what they heard.

SHEFFIELD: It was also reminiscent. Yeah. But it was also reminiscent of what happened earlier in the factory to either their parents or themselves.

STOCKMAN: Right. So they were remembering when the white guys didn’t want to train them, they were remembering how poorly the union treated their fathers and their uncles.

And the whole reason Wally got a job in that plant is that his uncle had been one of the first black men in that plant to operate a machine. Because his uncle had been hired after a long, process and it took civil rights fighting for Wally’s uncle to get a job in that plant in the sixties, got a job as a janitor. And it took the Civil Rights Act to pass before, Wally’s uncle was given the right to operate a machine. That history of discrimination against black people still matters because it caused this schism. The white guys were like: ‘Hey, you’re my union brother. How come we can’t stand together and fight this?’

But a lot of the black workers were like: ‘Nah, you probably don’t have my best interest in heart. And I remember the union’s not really for me. That’s, how some of them felt, not all, but some.

SHEFFIELD: And ultimately refusing to train the replacement actually wasn’t going to really get you anything ultimately. That’s kinda how it happened, right?

STOCKMAN: It’s interesting because we’re now seeing a lot of strikes. We’re seeing a reawakening of the labor movement that wasn’t in existence in 2017. In 2017, when I was reporting this book, a strike was hardly contemplated and we don’t know what standing together would have gotten them. We don’t actually know that, but I’m, I tend to be of your view that it wouldn’t have made a difference, but there are some people who say, look, the reason that unions have gotten weaker is that people stopped standing together and demanding things.

Anyway, it’s complicated, but at the time, the workers just, they just fell apart. They divided over this issue and many others. There was the issue of when you started working in the plant were you a new guy who’d come from another factory. And so you’re only going to get a severance bonus of three weeks, or have you been in that plant for 48 years, like the union president? And you’re going to get three weeks for every one of those 48 years, plus your pension.

It was really eyeopening to see how, even though they all worked in that same plant, they had a very different vantage point and even economic sort of incentives.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And that brings us to the third profile subject in the book, Shannon. Yeah. She was what like 45 and a grandmother? And you mentioned what she was doing for the factory, but in her case, she came to the factory as a means of escaping from an abusive relationship, basically, right?

STOCKMAN: Yes. Yep. Yep. She, yes, she was actually 42. She was she’s three months younger than me or older than me. Yeah, we’re the same age. And yet, she’s a grandma of a kid who wasn’t that young. Her granddaughter was four at the time. She was a fascinating person, not somebody I expected to find working as a steelworker in this plant.

That’s how that job had transformed her life. It gave her not only the money, but also the confidence to leave a guy who beat her up all the time and didn’t want her to work and, wanted her to be dependent on him. And she usually obeyed him, but when she got a chance to get a job in that plant, which she got through her uncle, just like Wally– they all did, they all got jobs through their uncle. She jumped at the chance and she wasn’t going to give that up because to her, that job was a status symbol.

Link-Belt, which is what the factory was called when she was younger, it was a famous company. It was known to make the world’s best bearings. It had its name on water towers and trucks. And when she told people that she worked at Link-Belt, she could see the envy on their faces. That’s how good a job it was for her. And a lot of people, maybe if you have a college degree and you live in Boston and you read the New York Times, you think: ‘Oh, those factory jobs are such shitty jobs. Anyway, no one really wants to do that.’ Shannon wanted to do that job. That was the best job Shannon will ever have. And it was her dream job.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so she didn’t have a plan going into the closure of the plant. So what happened to her afterwards?

STOCKMAN: Right. So she she was living in denial for a long time. She worked in the heat treat part of the plant, which was the last to move. So she was, she literally was there almost until it shut down. She was one of the last people in that plant. And she decided to train her replacement because it paid an extra $4 an hour. And, she had agonized over whether she should do it or not. ‘Is it moral or immoral to train.’ And she ended up training a young guy from Mexico and she forged a friendship with him. And she was very protective of him in the plant. She was afraid that somebody would attack him. And at the end of the training, he took her aside and he put his hand over his heart and he was trying to apologize, ‘I’m sorry that that I’m taking your job.’

And she said: ‘ I was blessed to have this job.’ Again, using the word _blessed_. ‘I was blessed to have this job and I hate to see it go. But now it’s your turn to be blessed.’ She really had convinced herself that this was a good thing because we should give to the less fortunate and Mexicans are less fortunate, let him have the job.

So she ended up– she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do after the factory closed. She stayed unemployed for a long time and part of the reason is that her son got very ill and his daughter relied on Shannon for everything, for caretaking. His daughter was disabled. And so Shannon was just like many working class women, she was juggling childcare and being the primary breadwinner of the home. So that was one thing that kept her unemployed.

And the other thing was that when my story came out in the New York Times about her, a very rich lawyer in New York paid off her mortgage. So her biggest fear was being homeless and now all of a sudden, this rich guy has paid off her mortgage, which was a whole crazy story in itself. I only got into a tiny portion of it in the book, but yeah, she had this patron in New York who promised her a job in Vegas.

He and his friend were so wealthy that they essentially split the cost of her mortgage. And I say in the book, it’s like other men decide this with the cost of a deep dish pizza. They had more thought process behind it, but it didn’t hurt them that much to share the cost for a mortgage.

And then this friend of the rich guy was building a hotel in Vegas and they said: ‘Okay, Shannon, we’re going to hire you when this hotel is built and we’re going to give you a job. It’s going to have a meaningful salary. We’ll pay for your granddaughter to be cared for. And you’ll never have to worry about anything in your life.’

Again, this was the, this was what she, it was just an unbelievable offer. And over the course of three years, we watch it unravel, especially under COVID.

So I don’t know if you want me to catch you up to where she is now, but she’s had a more dramatic life than anyone I’ve ever known. And she’d just taught me a lot just about how people survive and how they– women particular in her situation.

SHEFFIELD: We can talk about maybe later, in the discussion of where they are now. But I guess one of the things that was a consistent thing about all three of them is that, their faith is very important, was very important to all of them.

It’s an aspect of, I think, a lot of Americans that you just don’t see covered very much. And that’s one of the reasons that I started Flux, in fact, was that I felt like the national press didn’t talk about faith matters or faith controversies. Because these are real things that are important to people’s lives. And that are, that also do in so many ways, influence how they view politics, what jobs they pursue, et cetera. And yet they don’t get talked about very much. Is that–

STOCKMAN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Did they ever, what were their overall thoughts in regard to Donald Trump, for instance? Did they think about him saying he was the protector of Christians and things like that?

STOCKMAN: I’m not sure they would even know he’d said that, to be honest. The most religious person I followed was Wally, the black guy who, he was a believer in such a deep way. And I went to church with him a couple of times and the preacher had been in prison at one point and came out and made it part of his mission to try to welcome the formerly incarcerated into the church.

The preaching was a lot about God will provide. If you just believe in him, God will make sure you can pay your car note. There’s a bit of prosperity preaching in there. And a lot of those pastors were not for Donald Trump. In the black community, there weren’t at least in, in Indianapolis and in Wally’s family, I didn’t see it.

John had a spiritual life. But I don’t think it was– organized religion was not his thing. He told me that he got saved after his son almost drowned in a pool and didn’t drown. And his son, and this was not in the book, but when his son was saved in the hospital was resuscitated in the hospital, he asked his son, were you scared? And his son said: ‘Oh, no. Because Jesus was with me.”

And he, John, was appreciative that his son’s life was saved and the whole miracle of it, that he came to believe in God, but he still didn’t go to church after that, because he didn’t believe in– he was like: ‘I’m a independent guy.’

And I find that with a lot of people, they have a deep spirituality, but they don’t necessarily get onboard with all of that.

Shannon, she talked about going to church every once in a while, especially with the abusive when she was with this abusive guy, she was like: ‘Yeah, the pastor was so cute.’ They had different experiences with spirituality. Shannon was a believer in psychic mediums and the number of people in her world who believe in these crossing over psychic medium type people, ‘we’re going to help you speak to your dead mother and find out, basically cure your trauma from your childhood.’

And Shannon had so much childhood trauma from abuse, from being sexually molested by her stepdad. There was a lot. And she and so many of her friends were into this psychic medium stuff, which they did not see at all as contradictory with God or with church. She was very willing to believe in stuff that was supernatural.

I can’t say that this was a place where, when you’re talking about Trump as a protector of Christians, I can’t say I’ve ever heard that in Indianapolis. I would say, as they saw those who supported him, saw him as a protector of the working class and a protector of American factories.

And if you listened to his rhetoric about ‘you deserve your job, because you’re an American, don’t let the elites take this factory away because of their corporate greed.’ That was what really resonated with a lot of them.

And the other part of the message that resonated: Shannon’s father who had been a lifelong, ‘I will never vote’ did cast the first ballot of his life for Donald Trump. And he did it after his friend convinced him to start listening to Trump. And the part of the message that he really liked was not only the factory is staying here, but also Democrats are always trying to tear down good people with accusations of racism and sexism.

And Shannon’s father had worked at the Wonder bread plant for 31 years and got fired by a black supervisor. And Shannon’s father was convinced that she’d fired him because he was white. And yet he can’t lodge an EEOC complaint because white people can’t lodge EEOC complaints. So I heard a lot of the white workers complaining about this aspect of how they felt vulnerable to accusations of racism that could make them lose their job.

And, they appreciated this politically incorrect Trump, which they didn’t see that as embracing racism. They saw that as embracing fairness.

SHEFFIELD: And I guess, one of the other things that I think was notable that I saw a number of times was that, when you had mentioned various things about Trump to people that you were talking to, like Shannon had never heard of the idea of Trump saying that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t harm his support.

And that’s something that, as somebody who came out of religious fundamentalism and right wing media, that I think a lot of progressives who people who weren’t born in that, so non right-wingers, you just have no idea that the media that they do consume doesn’t tell them.

STOCKMAN: Oh yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Almost tells them nothing that is contradictory or it might make them look bad. And then at the same time, there are all these organizations out there that are trying to, they’re buying Facebook ads and trying to contact the average regular Americans constantly, and nothing like that exists on the political left.

STOCKMAN: No I’ve heard that that there’s no– it’s true. Because as liberal as the media can be, or is accused of being, we are not in the tank in the same way, right? We were really critical of Biden. Even the lefty activists, it’s not like antifa is out there fighting for Joe Biden. They’re not.

SHEFFIELD: They hate Joe Biden.

STOCKMAN: They hate him, right. So it’s very it’s asymmetric, that’s for sure. But yeah, for someone like Shannon, when she was working at the factory, she would work these long, 12 hour shifts sometimes, seven days a week for months on end. She’s not consuming the news the way that I’m consuming the news, or the way that my, my colleagues are consuming the news.

The average American is working class and doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of time to read the newspaper, even if it was something they were inclined to do. So I do think there’s that. If she had the news on, it would be showing something like, ‘oh, a steel mill roars back to life in Gary, Indiana because of the steel tariffs that Donald Trump put on steel. And so now the American steel industry is coming back.’

There’s nothing Shannon wants to hear more than that. She’s not going to be put in contact with other narratives and frankly, a lot of other narratives are narratives of college educated people talking about things that college educated people care about and that affect us.

So one of my big takeaways from the book is that talking heads on the news and people like myself, we were reflecting a certain view of globalization and that view was free trade and globalization are great for the economy. It’s a win-win. Look at how our economy is growing. Look at how much more wealth that our country has now than it did before. Look at our supply chain and how diversified it is and how cheap everything is. That was the view.

And yet, if you lived in a factory town that was decimated under NAFTA or after China entered the WTO, you saw a totally different picture. You saw if you lived in a town that made shoes and all of a sudden, now all these cheap shoes or furniture, textiles, all of a sudden no one has a job. You’ve lost your job, everyone, you know has lost their jobs. The people on the news, aren’t reflecting your reality.

They’re not talking about anything that you know, and that’s fake news to them. That’s fake news. Beause it doesn’t matter.

SHEFFIELD: It’s irrelevant.

STOCKMAN: The aggregate size of the economy doesn’t speak to the health of individual people, families, or communities. And we can just say ‘on average American workers weren’t harmed,’ but that’s taking the average of all of these white collar business people who, in the free trade deal, got the ability to invest in the insurance industry and the banking industry in Mexico, which is what NAFTA was really about. That was where the growth was. The growth markets are in Asia. We want to get into those markets. And the people who are benefiting from that are not the average American worker. Only half of Americans own stock.

We talk about what’s good for America, but American interests have all the time been defined by corporations and people with college degrees. And so I’m not saying that we’re an evil cabal, but we’re very divorced from the economic realities of everyday working people. And the policies that have prevailed for the last 30 years, haven’t necessarily supported everyday Americans all over the country.

The best thing you can say is: ‘Okay, now we have Walmart where we can buy a fleece jacket for much cheaper.’ But if you can’t find a job, it doesn’t matter really how much that fleece jacket costs, at the end of the day.

Shannon’s house was stuffed to the gills with things. Her boyfriend was a furniture mover. And so he would bring back the crumbs of what wealthy people threw off, the stuff that they didn’t want to take anymore. So her house was like a junk yard full of all this stuff. Cheap crap was not her problem. Her problem was: ‘Where do I fit into the economy? Is there a place that’s going to hire me and not just pay me, but give me a reason to live. Give me a reason to get up in the morning. Give me co-workers that respect what I do, a place of respect, even though no one has certified me, even though there’s no university that has put its stamp on me.’

What I found was that a lot of these workers, they knew a ton of stuff. Keeping those old machines running was not an easy task. I don’t know that I could’ve done Shannon’s job. It wasn’t just pushing a button. It was more complicated than that. And yet nobody respects what they do because they don’t have a college degree. And to me, it’s just, it’s astonishing that only a third of Americans have a four-year BA only a third of American adults over the age of 25 have a four year BA.

And yet people who have that credential are making, and even higher credentials, are making all of the decisions of significance in this country. And many of them are not aware of how those decisions are really affecting people who are actually the majority. And that’s what I think is the fundamental disconnect.

If we weren’t so disconnected, I don’t think our politics would be so bonkers right now. That’s just one of them. It’s something I came to believe because if you look at Shannon, she’s a person who went to high school, dropped out of high school. What was she learning in high school? She was not learning how to cast a ballot intelligently. She was being prepared to work in a factory that no longer exists. She wasn’t being taught civics. These are people who talk all the time, ‘oh, it’s a free country,’ and about the constitution. They don’t know the first thing about that– what’s in the actual constitution, balance of powers. None of it.

It was a profound disconnect between the knowledge you should have in order to cast an intelligent vote. But they did know one thing: that they’d been screwed. And the more I understood about their lives. The more I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t deny that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess one of the other things also beyond these policies that negatively impacted their jobs, it’s also the story of the failure of bureaucracy to help them as well. I think there are a lot of people that would like to go to college, or let’s say have some experience in a field, but they don’t have a certification for it.

And this is a real problem in the it world, that there’s a lot of people who know how to program in some language or know how to run a server in certain ways, because they learned it from experience. But all these companies are like: ‘No, you have to have a certification in order to work for us. We’ll not even talk to you. We won’t even look at your resume unless it says Certified X.’

But the problem is to get that certification, it costs you $1,200. And they don’t have that money. And, and that story happened to some degree with the workers at the plant, that there were systems that were supposed to help them, but in many cases were underfunded or the way they’re constructed are inscrutable– this menacing black box that just exists. And it’s not for you. It doesn’t care about you.

STOCKMAN: So you’ve touched on three areas. One is college and the accessibility of college. And I saw John’s daughter took out a lot of loans to be the first in her family to graduate with this college degree. And when he lost his job, she dropped out and ended up coming home for a while. I still think she’s gonna finish. But John, he was very skeptical about whether taking tens of thousands of dollars in loans for room and board to get a BA was going to pay off. And he had life experience to say that it might not.

Something like a third of American adults have had some college, maybe they have an associates degree, but more likely they’ve taken some college classes and dropped out.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and the inflation of college tuition is literally the worst commodity in the United States by far worse, and no one ever talks about it.

STOCKMAN: Yeah. So John, it was like a Ponzi scheme where all of the students have to pay all this money so that the rich professor can have a job and teach a class that was actually not going to get the student a job. And when you’re talking about well-known colleges I can say: Look, I don’t have more than a BA and I make a really good living.

But I’m not sure that somebody graduating with a lot of debt from Indiana State, you’re not sure. Because if you’re a working class person, you’re working while you’re going to school. So you’re also trying to balance waitressing or this, that, and the other, with getting your college degree.

And we only talk about the success stories. We don’t talk about all the people who drop out and have compound interest debt to pay back. So the very notion that we should have a society where everyone has to go to college and that’s the norm, right? The norm is offensive to someone like John, because he thinks you actually don’t need that. You can make a really good living in the trades. You can make a really good living fixing machines without a four-year college degree.

And I think that we have to respect, have a little bit more respect for the trades because those are jobs that people can make a good living on.

And I also want to say that when you talked about the software developers, I know a lot of software developers that had jobs, American software developers that had jobs, and then they were outsourced to big companies that brought in H1B visa people, folks from India who are here for three years and then get sent home. There’s a whole industry of bringing people here and in-sourcing, in-sourcing these tech jobs. Or globalization makes it possible design code, even if you’re in Kenya or Ukraine. And your cost of living as much cheaper there, so you’re not going to be paid the same amount.

I think that there’s a fundamental problem in the modern world today, which is that we’re still in these nation states that have laws and the way to get justice and to get to get a good living, right, is to have a labor movement that fights for minimum wage and to pass laws and get companies to, abide by environmental standards and give healthcare and all this stuff.

That’s what the left has been doing for so many years, get companies to be responsible for their workers. But then when those companies turn around and move the factories or outsource that work to folks overseas who can do it cheaper, we don’t have a response. We don’t have an answer to that.

And that’s where we have this idea of the soulless globalist, right? That’s a thing that conservatives talk about or Trump supporters talk about. And it comes from this notion of the person who used to hire you and pay your bills is now searching all over the world for someone else to do your job cheaper. And they don’t care about you. They’re not allegiant to you. They don’t live in this community. And all that matters is cost and efficiency.

SHEFFIELD: And to the extent they think about poverty, the way you put it was that they “think more often about poor people in Kenya than about poor people in the United States.”

STOCKMAN: Right. That’s the knock that they get. And I feel like we could do a much better job of at least expressing empathy when people lose their jobs, instead of saying: ‘Oh, the factory is gone, get over it,’ which is a real sentiment.

And there’s a real feeling among many that: ‘Okay, a huge number of Americans are never going to be employable. And so let’s just give them UBI. Let’s just give them universal basic income. Get a check in the mail. All we got to do is redistribute this income. But if you think about it, people who don’t trust the government all that much are very suspicious of the notion that they’re going to live off a check that comes from the government.

I went with John to go collect– I was following John when he had a problem with his unemployment insurance money coming through after the factory closed. And he had to run this gauntlet of government offices. It was like a full-time job just to get like a $300 check.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it’s offensive what these agencies put people through. It is.

STOCKMAN: And he said: ‘I am doing this because one, we need to pay the rent. But two, I paid into the system my whole life.’ But if it was a system he hadn’t paid into, he would have done anything to avoid it. He would have taken four jobs, or whatever. He was not going to live off welfare.

And that was the thing that a lot of people don’t understand about the working class. At least among the steelworkers I followed. They looked down on the idea of welfare. They were very proud not to have to rely on it. And if they had someone in their family, which so many of them did, had people in their family who relied on it, it was like ‘I’m not like them.’

Because work is the dividing line between you and your neighbor who takes drugs, or you and your son who won’t get off the couch and do something for himself.

So I just think that yes, redistribution is part of the answer, but if it’s redistribution for people to live and do nothing– during COVID, a lot of people got those checks and we had to do that, but mass unemployment doesn’t produce a healthy society. We lost 90,000 people to opioid overdoses in 2020, that was a 30% increase over the previous year.

So we know that people who are sitting around without jobs are not necessarily healthy people. And we’d have to have a really big rethink of our society. And I know this is runs against the grain of the “Big Quit” and the “Great Resignation” or whatever, but unemployment is– studies from all over the world show that it is highly correlated with mental health issues.

SHEFFIELD: But a lot of that though, the Big Resignation or whatever you want to call it, it’s that people have realized that their employers were exploiting them also. Like the idea of the corporate office. For a lot of jobs, unless you’re making a product where you physically have to be around other people it’s not necessary.

And the reason that it exists is not economically sustainable. It’s actually less efficient economically. And it’s bad for the environment. These gigantic, massive glass-covered buildings that are just energy waste and all the driving that makes people do. The corporate office should not exist for a lot of things, especially for white collar work.

And that’s one of the things that from the pandemic, I thought that a lot of businesses leaders would learn this, because they were able to perform their operations without having their office that they would realize: ‘Oh gosh, you know what? I was wasting my money paying for this. I could get by having people have a hybrid environment or like a retreat type work environment where you work from home most of the time, but then you have, like a week long retreat for people.

That was how I ran my business when I was doing right wing marketing and web design and production. And the people that worked for me, they loved it. And I loved it too.

But there is the sense, among a lot of older executives, that: ‘This is just how I was used to it. This is how it’s always been done to have an office. And plus, I just don’t know if these people are doing their job. I don’t trust them to be working for me if I can’t see them.’

And it’s really antiquated. And even in the news business, it’s so ridiculous that I see so many people who work in media that can’t find a job now or have been laid off. And so they had to move to somewhere lower cost and then they go in and look at job listing and it’s must live in New York.

You’re covering politics, but you say it’s okay to live in New York. The senators are not coming to New York. You living in New York has no benefit to you as a politics reporter or writer.

So it’s just the same as if you were living in Indiana or if you were living in Philly, or Los Angeles, or Ohio, they’re not coming to you. You’re not seeing them. You know what I mean?

STOCKMAN: Yeah. I think we’d be better off if more political reporters moved out to the Heartland, all of those places that people rarely go and maybe we’re going there. Maybe that’s the future.

We’re seeing that in the knowledge industry, if you have an internet connection, that could be a silver lining of COVID that people end up fanning out around the country more and getting to know each other a little bit better.

And I think that would be a healthy thing. Because when everybody from your Harvard class of 96 is living in one of three cities or one of four cities, maybe that’s a overestimation, but there’s not that many people who I know who are in places like Indiana now.

And that’s a brain drain inside our own country. So I do think that in the knowledge economy, people can in fact work the way you’re talking. But waiters? No, they have to go to work. Truck driver? They have to show up. Bus drivers, cashiers, tattoo artists, people who run gyms. There was a real divide in 2020 in between people who could work without putting their lives at risk, and those who couldn’t, those who had to show up in person. So that was also something that was interesting.

SHEFFIELD: Maybe that’s a good final topic here. I think covering the closure of a factory and hundreds of people going jobless, it could be seen as a depressing book, yet, I don’t think it was if you actually read it. Have people said that to you, they’ve asked you if it was depressing to write your book and what did you think?

STOCKMAN: Yeah, there, there are a lot of people who have assumed that it was depressing for me. And I actually came away feeling more optimistic about the country because I realized, yes, Shannon, Wally, and John had huge challenges, but I realized what great people they were, even though they often said things that drove me crazy. I realized they weren’t bad people.

And I realized how much more they had in common with each other than they did with the CEO that was sending their job away. The average American has a lot in common with each other; and if we could just get– and they loved each other in that factory, they really had a comradery, often across lines of race.

I’m not saying it was all unicorns and rainbows, but they had a bowling team. They went to Colts games together. They went fishing together, hunting, and there was a lot more friendships than I expected to see in some parts of the plant. I won’t say it’s everybody. But I just came away feeling they weren’t the caricature that they’re often portrayed, and we can learn from them.

And I’m hopeful that if we start a conversation that’s really listening to people on the ground. We’ll get somewhere, rather than lecturing them about how we know more about their interests than they do. And why don’t they both their own interests.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I think that’s true. And a lot of it just simply is that, in our narrow cast and customized social media networks, it’s so easy to become isolated and just with people like you. And that’s something that I think, as I mentioned in the intro that, work for a lot of people is the only way that they really come into contact with people different from them.

And as that becomes difficult, harder to sustain that type of environment, we need to try to look for other ways to have connections and to talk to people. And that’s especially true for us in the media industry that you can’t assume that people have read some article that came out a month or two ago and be like: ‘I don’t want to write that article again, because we already wrote that article.’

STOCKMAN: Yeah, mostly you can assume they haven’t read it because yeah there’s so much great stuff being written and most of it’s not being read by ordinary folks. So I think we have to work harder to be in conversation.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I agree. All right. So this has been a great conversation, Farrah. Your book is American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears. And you also are on Twitter at fstockman. Thank you for being here today.

STOCKMAN: Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, so that’s our show for today. I hope you enjoyed it. And please do check out Farah’s book. It’s an important one. It’s good to look at how there’s multiple angles to the divisions that we have in our society today, and also to see that we have a lot more in common than it may otherwise seem. And to get out and see other people, and see what they’re talking about. To learn from them, and maybe teach them a few things.