The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele

heavily industrialized city of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Although they’re produced under tight security in a limited-access industrial park, a former worker from DeWitt obtained an inside view of the Chinese operation after Newell hired him to try to straighten out production problems there.
    A twenty-year veteran of DeWitt, Bruce McDougall arrived in China not long after the Nebraska plant closed to find the new Shenzhen operation in chaos. Components were arriving from multiple suppliers and were hard to track. There was no quality control on the production line. Newly manufactured tools broke or wouldn’t work, he said. From the outside, the factory didn’t look much different from plants in the States, but inside was another story. To McDougall, the place was like a time capsule, a throwback to earlier times when Vise-Grip’s DeWitt plant relied on manual labor to make the tools.
    “It looked more like Vise-Grip in 1950, when everything was made by hand,” McDougall said, rather than like the highly automated plant that Newell had shut down in 2008 to be more “competitive.” He said Newell kept throwing more and more bodies into the mix to increase production. But even with five times the workforce of DeWitt, McDougall said, production still faltered. “We were turning out fifty thousand tools a day at the end in DeWitt,” he said. “Their best day in China was fifteen thousand with five times the number of people.”
    There were other contrasts too. In DeWitt, many Vise-Grip employees lived in neat, well-kept houses on quiet lanes not far from the plant, but in China Newell’s workers were packed into dormitory-like quarters adjacent to the factory. Living conditions mirrored the chaos of the plant floor. As many as twelve workers were stuffed into cramped rooms for sleeping. “The night shift guy would go in and work twelve hours,” McDougall said. “Then he’d go back to the dorm and wake up the day shift guy, who’d go in for twelve hours.” McDougall spent three months in China and couldn’t wait to leave. “The place was off the wall,” he said. Even with the cheap labor, McDougall said it was costing Newell more to make the Vise-Grip in China when he was there than it had cost in DeWitt.
    This was the height of economic insanity. A once-pathbreaking American industrial innovator, whose manufacturing processes had been successfully modernized by a company that was the anchor employer for an entire community, was sold not because greater economic efficiencies could be achieved elsewhere, let alone because quality or distribution could be improved. It was picked off by a rapacious corporation and dumped haphazardly thousands of miles away. A case of a short-term gain for a corporation, but at the expense of a sustainable economic future for a community.
    The loss of the Vise-Grip plant was a betrayal of the people of DeWitt. The village clerk, Linda Schuerman, whose husband worked at the plant for decades, is deeply upset over Washington’s indifference to working people and the impact it is having on communities such as DeWitt:
I’m not a political person, but something’s wrong with Washington, D.C. They are to blame. They should have kept the companies here. We are nosing our way into all these countries that don’t want us and can’t stand us when we should be helping our own people. All the people out here want to do is make a living and support their families.
    Coming into DeWitt, visitors pass the massive, four-columned brick entry sign on Highway 103 that has welcomed visitors to the town for years: HOME OF THE VISE-GRIP TOOL. The town’s website also pays tribute to the enterprise that brought prosperity and economic well-being to more than three generations, but it has had to adjust to the times. On the website, DeWitt is no longer the “home” of the Vise-Grip Tool, but its “birthplace.” Like so many chapters in the story of American manufacturing, this one is now