Hanging out in a little town in central Missouri last week, I saw an old factory. Because of the seminar I’d just been sitting in on, it caught my eye. It was falling apart, probably unused and unoccupied for decades. The situation in rural Missouri is the same as it is all over the country: Manufacturing jobs are leaving the country and they’re not coming back. That’s just the way it is, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame NAFTA or Clinton or greedy capitalists or whoever seems like the convenient scapegoat.

It’s just the way it is. America is becoming something no one could’ve foreseen — post-Industrialist. But is that all bad?

The seminar I’d been attending was a talk about how to address the needs of dislocated factory workers. It was part of a two-day event I was covering for a client that oversees workforce issues in this region of Missouri. Doing their newsletter has been a bit of an education for me. It’s fascinating work, if occasionally depressing. The huge wheels that are turning are beyond anyone’s ability to stop, and the disruption caused by the reverses of fortune is difficult to conceive.

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Little cogs in big machines

Consider the lot of these little factory towns, for example. From their early days as steamboat ports or railroad depots, they morphed into small populations that could only exist because there was a Stetson Hat factory in town, or a metal fabricator or an industrial distributor. The people who grew up in that town hated the factory, but they also depended on it. The factory represented the unrelenting tedium that they would settle for just to make a living wage, but it also represented employment. And if they were willing to throw in their lot with the factory, they knew they wouldn’t need to finish school or worry about their lack of education and complex skills. The factory wouldn’t want the entire person, after all — just the hands it took to move parts from one place to another, or the eyes it took to spot what the machinery missed, or the ability to sew the same straight line over and over and over again for 30 or 40 years.

That’s what life was, and any of their kids who couldn’t take it left. The ones who didn’t leave town took their place at the conveyor belt and made their peace as best they could. They didn’t leave town because there was no place to go, except to another factory in another factory town. The kids who grew up thinking that education and opportunity were for other people were trapped in factory jobs. They hated it but they settled for it, and in their turn they taught their kids to do the same.

And now, here we are. The Stetson Hat factory laid off people when it found that the only way it could stay competitive was to “off-shore” the seamstress jobs to China. Then it laid off more. Then it closed. So did the metal fabricator and so did the distributor. All of the labor could be done cheaper in developing countries. The labor unions tried to hold the line, but they couldn’t. The local politicians (and the national ones) tried to suggest that the right result in the next election would make a difference, but it didn’t. The forces at work were just too big, and the only ones who didn’t know it were the factory workers who chose to keep believing that all the other factory layoffs and closings would never affect them, until they did.

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Victims of progress

The people who are conducting the conference I attended are some of the people on the front lines. They meet these dislocated workers and try to help them over the difficult next steps. They try to help them past their disbelief that the factory closed, past their unreal expectations that there’s another factory out there looking for the people whose only skill is the ability to settle for factory wages and factory tedium. The workforce specialists are the people that start the process of convincing them that there’s a new world out there that requires a different kind of work than any they’ve known. That world doesn’t look as much for the ability to make repetitive gestures or sew a straight line as much as it does for specialized vocational skills, math and science proficiency and problem-solving abilities.

And here’s the part that I never would’ve known if I hadn’t listened to what those workforce developers say: the dislocated workers choose not to believe that. They often opt to park reality and just subsist on less money than any of us can imagine rather than get up and leave the town with the shuttered factory and the bygone promise of employment. Factory workers in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s don’t leave, and only a fraction of them get the training offered by the federal and state governments in order to transition into the working world as it is now. They put a lot of resourcefulness into trying to work the system so that they can go on collecting a pittance, and they scrape by. They don’t leave the old world — they just stay where they are and pay whatever price is required.

To be honest, there’s not much hope that that’ll change anytime soon. The older workers — the ones that received the factory-worker mindset at their mother’s or father’s knee — simply can’t change.

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The good news about the bad news

The hope is in the children that are in school now, and it’s because of that hope that I wonder at the end of the day if all the news of off-shoring is bad news. Because if the workforce developers, the employers, the educators and the parents of these children can reach them, the world that awaits them on the ash-heap of the town’s factory is a world beyond what anyone could’ve imagined when factories were in their heyday.

It’s a world that rewards education and enterprise with the one prize that no one can overlook — gainful employment. The gruntwork has gone overseas. But the occupations connected with engineering, technology, innovation, the arts, healthcare, customer service and entrepreneurship are still here and in greater demand than ever. Children in this little factory town in the 60’s dropped out of school because there was no reason for them to stay; children in this town now stay in school because work is finally connected with education again, as it was meant to be.

Mightn’t it just turn out to be a better world for those children than the ones their parents and grandparents knew?

That’s my question, looking at the factory by the river’s edge, shot through with rust and crumbling slowly into the Missouri River. It may be that some new industry is erected on its remains that robs its workers of as much of their humanity as all the ones that have come before. Right now, after all, one of the biggest employers in town is the “riverboat casino” where my client’s event is being held — these gaming venues that are neither boats nor quite on the river, just gambling megaliths skating through a legal loophole in order to bring slot machines and blackjack to an elderly and disabled clientèle. It may be that all the industry and ingenuity of those employed at some new kind of job that doesn’t exist yet will be as ill-spent as they were by those who sewed seams for a living or checked matches for imperfections or assembled little packets of nuts and bolts.

But it’s hard to imagine how it could be, and on the other hand, it’s not hard for me to imagine that the ashes of this factory may turn out to be the fertile ground that can give rise to better things.

Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s not.