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It Was a cold evening in early December 2006, and Tracy Warner had just returned home from Willits Primary School. Ryan had just sung in the “Winter Wonderland” musical there. Christmas lights dotted F Street, adding some warmth to her modest block in the heart of Monmouth, Illinois. She looked like a new woman, and, judging by her smile, she knew it. The jeans and T-shirt—the uniform of the anxious, soon-to-be-unemployed line worker and picketer of a couple years earlier—had been replaced by a red V-neck sweater, silk blouse, and an aura of confidence. She was wrapping up four fall semester classes and a journalism internship at the school’s news­paper, the Western Courier. She had done this while raising Ryan and frantically looking for a job. She was set to graduate on the following Saturday from Western Illinois University. The dream Warner had dreamt a thousand times while piecing together refrigerator doors on the Maytag line for over fifteen years was coming true. “Look at this,” she said, handing me an essay. “It’s a paper on Rawls’ theory of justice. He said that we have to stand behind a veil of ignorance to make fair decisions.” Her reference fit the moment. John Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice poses a hypothetical world in which all societal roles are shuffled behind a metaphorical “veil of ignorance.” Behind this veil, one does not know to what role he or she will be assigned in the new social order. It is only from there, Rawls argues, can one truly judge the fairness of various social roles and relations. The CEO, for instance, would have to experience the lives of workers he put out of work. Warner still saw Ralph Hake as a great villain—and it was not just because of the factory closing and the gutting of her working life as well as the working lives of her friends and co-workers. Warner had embraced the changes as best she could, and she and Ryan would find a way to survive.

In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. Carney was paired with a partner, an automated cutting machine with five enormous shark-toothed saw blades that bit loudly into lumber and dropped boards onto the tray below. Now 51, Carney was using his body to earn a living again, even if the job paid only $9 an hour, a shade above the Illinois minimum. The first week he put in 60 hours. “It was a hard job. It was perfect for me.” On April 29, his ninth day on the job, Carney’s life changed forever, again. Two days after an unremarkable Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection, a two-by-six shot out of the saws like “a ball out of pitching machine.” Its long side smacked right into Carney’s skull, and in an instant his world went dark. In the previous year Carney had been bartending while he lived in his son’s extra bedroom in Matherville, Illinois. He served “fancy, high falutin” drinks at the Oak View Country Club starting in late May 2009, after being unemployed for a couple of months. Members liked Carney because he would remember their names and favorite drink. The “whisky-beer man” learned to make cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and other country club mixes. “I always told myself I was shy, but everyone tells me I’m not. I feel uncomfortable with it, but I seem to be fairly sociable.” In August he added a day job at Milan Lanes, a bowling alley and bar, and was working almost every day. Still, it was a “pretty low point” to be a working-age man living in his son’s extra room. It was a role-reversal that neither of them relished. “You don’t feel like you got anything,” Carney said of the year after leaving the Town Tavern. Then Carney’s father succumbed to cancer in March 2010.

Annette Dennison Was asleep when a girlfriend called her with the news. It was mid-morning on October 11, 2002, her thirty-fifth birthday. Annette, a self-proclaimed “night owl,” had worked the second shift the night before and pulled into her driveway in Monmouth at 1 a.m. after the sixteen-mile trip from the warehouse in Galesburg. Monmouth, over forty years after Michael Patrick made his first commute to Appliance City in 1959, was still a town of about 10,000. Home to a hog slaughterhouse on one side and little Monmouth College on the other, Monmouth claimed to be the hometown of gambler, gunfighter, and lawman Wyatt Earp. “No way!” She sat alone, dazed. Her boys were at school. Her husband, Doug, was at the factory getting briefed by managers from Newton. Happy birthday, Annette, she thought. Now find something else to do with your life. A flood of emotions overwhelmed her that morning. She had been stuck in the factory since she was 22 and didn’t care for the mind-numbing work. Recently she had spent her evenings on an electric forklift in the Regional Distribution Center zipping through a landscape of brown cardboard boxes. She loaded and unloaded washers, dryers, microwaves, stoves, and refrigerators in and out of semis, one after the other, all night long. Most Maytag appliances built in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio came to the cavernous warehouse across the street from Appliance City. On the forklift Annette would sometimes daydream about getting out, but the work had become comfortable. She had spent nearly her entire adulthood in the factory. She had girlfriends, drinking buddies, and an assortment of familiar and friendly faces she would miss. It was through them that Annette had developed strong loyalty to the factory and even to the brand itself since she started in 1989, the year of the first Maytag refrigerator. A million questions popped into her head. She had always been a Type A personality and planner, and this was so sudden. She had no idea what to do.

Tracy Warner Began to worry after she got a rejection letter from Pizza Hut a few weeks after graduating from Western. She hadn’t heard on some manager-level jobs at the Carl Sandburg Mall, but she expected at least some positive responses from the entry-level ones. “We wish you luck in finding a job worthy of your skills,” read the Pizza Hut letter. “What’s that?” Warner said, exasperated. “Either my skills suck, or I have too many skills. Which is it? ’Cause I’m kind of curious! It’s flattering to be overqualified but it doesn’t pay the bills.” Warner hadn’t expected a dream job to suddenly appear, but she had hoped for more than a quiet phone and a growing pile of rejection letters. She just needed something, anything, to get by. Several months into 2007, the newly minted and distinguished WIU graduate was still unemployed and uninsured. Although sworn off factory life, a desperate Warner applied to Farmland Foods. When Maytag shuttered in 2004, Farmland, a massive, loud, hog disassembly operation, became the largest employer in this part of western Illinois. With about 1,200 to 1,400 cutters and slicers and a $60 million payroll, the slaughterhouse employed a couple hundred more than BNSF, the largest employer in Galesburg. Like Mike Smith, Warner was just looking for a wage, any wage, with a “1” in front of it, and Farmland, on Monmouth’s northern edge, was close. It was so close, in fact, that on some days Warner could smell the tangy mix of rendered hog, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and whatever else made up that vile smell in her house, a mile to the south. Farmland was a last resort for former Maytag workers. The jobs there, involving tearing apart pig carcasses with razor-sharp knives and powerful pneumatic tools were, frankly, tougher than appliance work. Perhaps worst was the “sticker,” which slit the throats of about 1,000 shrieking animals each hour for about $12 an hour. That was one pig every four seconds, at about a penny per kill.

On the Last day there would be a potluck and a drawing for some free appliances and $100 in cash. It was clear, though, that those still around in September 2004 could hardly wait for this drawn-out shuttering finally to be over. Crews were taking down the lighting, removing tables and cabinets, and gathering screws and air gun bits to toss in the garbage. “I don’t know if they are going to start with fresh tools down there in Reynosa or what the deal is,” Tracy Warner said. The crews also asked workers to remove photographs and newspaper clippings from their workstations. “They are dismantling it all around us, like they can’t wait for us to get out of there.” The lawn outside, usually covered in pop cans, plastic wrappers, and cigarette butts, was cleaned up and sprayed green by Chem Lawn. Management was trying to sell the old place. Warner’s imminent layoff was part of a sea-change in Illinois in the first years of the new millennium. The pace of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the fourth-largest manufacturing state in the country had been unprecedented. From June 2000 to November 2003, Illinois lost more than 100 manufacturing jobs a day, or one out of every six. Gone were over 150,000 jobs in a state of 12,500,000. In Rockford, the machine-tool industry wilted, and unemployment spiked at over 11 percent. In Harvard, located near the Wisconsin border, Motorola closed its cellphone plant. Developers wanted to turn the site into the world’s largest indoor water park. In Peoria, Decatur, and Kankakee, laid-off workers applied for jobs at Walmarts and Home Depots that would pay them maybe half their former wage. In suburban Chicago, Winzeler Gear went from making 2 million gears a month with fifty-five workers to making 16 million a month with thirty-five employees. A robot the size of a minivan increased the factory’s output while also eliminating human labor. Even with the productivity boost, the owner doubted the company would be able to stay competitive.