What has become of working-class life in small-town America?

[Tom Joad]

A pretty good article on how things have changed over the past 40 or so years.

“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November he became the first Democratic mayor of Muncie in two decades. Before embarking on a political career, Tyler, who is sixty-nine, spent more than forty years in the fire department. For most of that time, he worked out of a firehouse just a mile and a half from where he grew up on Muncie’s Southside. “You could go to Borg Warner, and if you didn’t like Borg Warner you could leave and go to Chevrolet; if you didn’t like Chevrolet you could leave and go to Delco; if you didn’t like Delco you could leave and go to Acme-Lee, or dozens and dozens of other little places that were spinning off mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops.”

But then, Muncie’s economy went into reverse. Between 1979 and 2009, manufacturing jobs dropped by more than half, and all the largest union employers—Borg Warner, which at its peak employed upward of 5,000 UAW members at three transmission plants; Chevrolet and Delco Remy, which employed thousands more—shut their doors or left town. In the process, the poverty rate ballooned to 29 percent, and the local tax base collapsed. Instead of coming to Muncie for work, people now followed the jobs out: from a peak of around 77,000 in 1980, the population shrank to 70,000 by 2010, and would have gone much lower if the city hadn’t begun furiously annexing surrounding suburbs to the north and west. By any measure—population loss, abandoned homes, crime—the brunt of these changes were felt south of the White River.

“They’re all dead-end jobs, like this one,” a woman named Sandy tells me across a picnic table behind a family motel on a gaudy three-mile stretch of strip malls that used to be the northern city limit but today is Muncie’s busiest commercial thoroughfare. She and the other women on the housekeeping crew take their cigarette breaks here, surrounded by the parking lots of a Burger King, an IHOP, and a supermarket. Most of them hail from the Southside, like Beth, a woman in her mid-forties who lost her job at a bar that closed around the same time that her husband was laid off from a $13.25-an-hour job at a local machine shop. The women, none of whom wanted their last names used, make $7.25 an hour to clean the motel’s 101 rooms, and although they can get twenty-five or thirty hours of work during busy periods, in the winter they’re lucky to get two days a week. None of them would dream of quitting—a paycheck of any kind is hard enough to come by these days. “I had been applying everywhere for a very long time,” says Christie, the youngest on the crew. “It just so happened that I walked down here on the right day.” With an older woman’s cynicism, she says she will “probably” be working at places like the Signature Inn for the rest of her life.

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