5/16/2023 0 Comments Greed corp bonus carrierThis is the sentiment that Trump played to so effectively during the 2016 presidential campaign. “When you start taking away the middle class, what do you have left?” “The big picture is that American jobs are leaving this country to exploit cheap labor,” he said. And at $25 an hour, the Feltners looked to be back in the game. Not long after they did, Rexnord called back. Down to their last $200, the Feltners moved back to Indiana - job or no job. He began trying for a position back in Indiana - at Rexnord - and even drove 14 hours for an interview only to be turned down in five minutes. In preparation for being sold, the company began to downsize. “That was really hard.”Īnd then the job in Texas dried up. They knew no one, and Feltner found himself on the road four days a week, traveling a territory that covered six states. The Feltners pulled their kids out of school and moved just outside of Dallas. Eventually, he won a promotion and a transfer - to Texas. He went on to manage their fleet of vehicles, ran purchasing in the mailroom and moved into the loss control department. He took a job with an insurance company - as a janitor. “We lost everything we had,” Feltner said.Īs Feltner began looking for work, the family began moving through a series of rental homes, some better than others. They got behind on their house payments and soon went to foreclosure. It was unexpected and fell heavy on the Feltners. Others, maybe a dozen union workers, also have signed up to be trainers. Feltner tried to explain to the man that he was helping the company take away his livelihood. “But my own union people? It’s disgusting.”įeltner says one co-worker he talks to every day has agreed to train the Mexican workers. “There’s no animosity towards the Mexican people at all - they’re just a face to an idea to me,” Feltner said. And this is what galls Feltner, who’s an officer in the union. But a few workers have gone a step further, taking an extra $4 per hour to show their replacements the tricks of the trade. RELATED: Rexnord workers agree to severance deal while hoping for Donald Trump's interventionįeltner doesn’t hate his shadows, which Milwaukee-based Rexnord refers to as “Team Monterrey.” What Feltner resents is that Rexnord pushed the United Steelworkers to agree to provide “knowledge transfer” to their replacements in exchange for a better severance package.įor most workers, this has meant merely providing answers to questions asked by Team Monterrey. RELATED: Rexnord finalizes plan to close Indianapolis plant as union leader blasts 'corporate greed' RELATED: Rexnord workers caught in Trump vs. Jobs that union officials say will pay $3 an hour. Soon, the workers from Mexico will take what they’ve learned back to Monterrey and apply it to their new jobs. Skills they’ve used to cut steel with precision and turn it into the mechanisms that turn axles on industrial machines and run conveyor belts for the mining industry and for firms like FedEx. If all that wasn’t ugly enough, Feltner and his co-workers have in recent weeks found they have new shadows on the job - workers from Mexico who are looking over their shoulders, trying to glean the skills Feltner and his union brothers have accumulated over years, even decades. Now, he’s looking squarely at being middle-aged and unemployed. And for a steelworker in the Rust Belt, he said, “There’s not (other) $25-an-hour jobs out there.”įeltner, 47, had hopes of riding out Rexnord until retirement. He’s been willing to put up with it, however, because Rexnord has paid him $25 an hour. Hated watching the company look for reasons to fire people. Hated the six-day workweeks that kept him away from his family. He’s worked at Rexnord for 3½ years and hated just about everything about it.
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