The Carrier plant here is plenty profitable. But moving to Monterrey, where workers earn in a day what they make here in an hour, will increase profits faster.
.. For workers like Mr. Roell, 36, who started at Carrier just weeks after receiving his high school diploma and never returned to school, the problem is not a shortage of jobs in the area. Instead, it is a drought of jobs that pay anywhere near the $23.83 an hour he makes at Carrier, let alone enough to give him a toehold in the middle class.
When he drives to work each day before dawn, Mr. Roell passes warehouse after warehouse of giants like Walmart and Kohl’s with “Help Wanted” signs outside promising jobs within. The problem is that they typically pay $13 to $15 an hour.
.. But nearly all that growth occurred in the service sector — hotel and food-service jobs, or health care technicians, or workers in the warehouses Mr. Roell drives past
.. Rexnord’s plan to pull up stakes even after the Carrier situation suggests businesses will not bow to the threat of bad P.R.
.. across developed economies more national income is going to capital, that is, owners and shareholders, rather than labor. “We’ve seen this in many countries with different political systems,” he said. “It’s a winner-take-all world.”
.. Just the hope that Mr. Trump will try to reverse the long decline in their neighborhoods, their living standards and even their longevity is an emotional balm.
.. Instead of bias, what animates these voters, whatever their race or political orientation, is a profound distrust and resentment of wealthier, educated Americans, a group they say lacks a connection to them and does not care about their economic situation. And to them, Mrs. Clinton seemed at least as elite as Mr. Trump, if not more so.
.. To them, it’s not only the country that’s in bad shape. So are the institutions that once provided structure to working-class life in America. Many Carrier workers are regular churchgoers, but Ms. Hargrove said she was deeply troubled by how priests abused children, or how the police shot suspects even though their arms were raised in the air.
.. “I’m as left-wing as you can find, and I thought Trump was full of it,” he said. “But everybody is tired of the same old politicians. It could have been Captain Kangaroo and he might have won.”