The Daily - Friday, Dec. 29, 2017

The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year — listening back, and then hearing what’s happened since the stories first ran. Today, we return to the story of Shannon Mulcahy and other steelworkers in Indiana who lost their jobs when their factory moved to Mexico. Guest: Farah Stockman, a national correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 43m
Broadcast on: 29 Dec 2017
Audio Format: other

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Brought to you by the Capital One Saver Card. With Saver, you are an unlimited 3% cashback on dining, entertainment, and at grocery stores. That's unlimited cashback on ordering takeout from home, or unlimited cashback on tickets to concerts and games. So grab a bite, grab a seat, and earn unlimited 3% cashback with the Saver Card. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Hi, it's Michael. This week, the Daily has been revisiting favorite episodes of the year, listening back and then hearing what's happened in the time since the story's first ran. Today, Shannon. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbero. This is the Daily.

Today, Shannon Mulcahy's job in an Indiana steel plant was headed to Mexico. Donald Trump vowed to keep those kinds of jobs inside the United States. How the promise of America first has collided with the reality of American manufacturing. It's Wednesday, October 18th. I'm going to bring jobs back. We're bringing jobs back to our country. We're not going to let carrier leave. We're going to take numbers. We're going to do numbers. There are consequences when you leave, and we'll talk about carrier because say what you want, Indiana, I've been talking about carrier now for four months, right? Before I even knew that we were going to be coming, I mean, literally from the day, literally from the day.

Just a mile down the road from the carrier plant in Indianapolis is the rexner plant where steel workers have been manufacturing the Cadillac of steel bearings for nearly 60 years, strengthening the parts through a process known as heat treating. I got to say, I've never ran scrap the whole time I've been there. You've never you've never run scrap. Okay, I guess that's kind of shop talk. Scrap is like a bad part, like knowing that it's bad and you send it on through. Shannon Mulcahy worked at rexnerd for almost 18 years and heat treat. It's got to be pretty much perfect. We've got different customers that depend on that bearing and it can't fail out on the field. I mean, whether it be conveyor or a bridge, different things like that and to hurt somebody out there on the field. And if you get that part, say, you didn't temper it enough, okay, that will lead to the part cracking and breaking. Some of these are infrastructure that carry human beings back and forth. It would seem pretty pretty vital. I take pride in my work. Shannon is a 43 year old single mother of two who dropped out of high school. My colleague, Ferris Stockman, has been reporting on the plant. She was a legacy hire. My uncle Gary got me a job on there. It started out as a janitor. And at the time, you had to know someone to get a job at this factory. And so she begged him for a job? Yeah, wasn't kind of like the janitor who cleans the bathrooms. It was the janitor who shovels out the machine chips and the coolant, fill the coolant, pump out the machines of the coolant. It was a nasty job, but I stuck with it. I was actually working as an assembly at this time when I signed a heat treat job. I was trained by what I call the old timers. The old timers would say heat treat is not for a woman. And they hazed her. They tried a lot of different ways to kind of get her to quit. And I'll be honest with you, I was ready to walk out of that department. We was doing a light up on the furnaces. And which that's the most dangerous part of your job. And to turn the furnace on. Yeah, to light the furnaces. And I was going, yep, yep, listening to him. He goes, now go over there and open that valve over there. He didn't say open it slowly or anything. So I just went over there and I opened that valve and that son of a gun went, boom, it scared the crap out of me. And I really was really thinking about leaving at that point that I didn't. I actually learned from then sabotaging better than anything I think. Because I had to figure it out. You got to go up these stairs. Then you got to go down the stairs to turn the machine on. Which is on this panel. And Shannon got to know these machines really well. And she had personalities assigned to these machines. And her favorite one was the taco.

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