Robert King

robert.king@indystar.com

John Feltner is about to lose his job.

It could happen tomorrow or next week or next month. And he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.

Feltner is a machinist at Rexnord Corp., the ball bearings manufacturer that’s about to move work done for generations on Indianapolis’ west side to a new plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The phrase “shipping jobs to Mexico” has become rhetorical gold for politicians, but at Rexnord it's distastefully real. Of late, Feltner and his 350-plus co-workers at the Rockville Road plant have been boxing up machinery and shipping it to Mexico. As more of the machinery goes, the jobs will soon follow.

Feltner is a burly guy with what appears to be a shaved head under his cap. He has a goatee, hooped earrings and a penchant for wearing silver skull rings on his fingers.

Feltner also is soft spoken and articulate, polish earned after months of giving interviews to media from around the world in the wake of President Donald Trump’s intervention at nearby Carrier, Trump's hopeful tweets about Rexnord and then his feud with Chuck Jones, the inimitable president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999. Yet the polish can’t obscure Feltner’s anger.

He’s worked at Rexnord for 3½ years and hated just about everything about it. Hated the mandatory overtime. Hated the six-day workweeks that kept him away from his family. Hated watching the company look for reasons to fire people. He’s been willing to put up with it, however, because Rexnord has paid him $25 an hour. And for a steelworker in the Rust Belt, he said, “There’s not (other) $25-an-hour jobs out there.”

Feltner, 47, had hopes of riding out Rexnord until retirement. Now, he’s looking squarely at being middle-aged and unemployed. 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. 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. Soon, the workers from Mexico will take what they’ve learned back to Monterrey and apply it to their new jobs.

Jobs that union officials say will pay $3 an hour.

More Rexnord coverage:

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Rexnord workers agree to severance deal while hoping for Donald Trump's intervention

Why Carrier deal could set troubling precedent

Feltner doesn’t hate his shadows, which 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.

For most workers, this has meant merely providing answers to questions asked by Team Monterrey. But a few workers have gone a step further, taking an extra $4 per hour to show their replacements the tricks of the trade. And this is what galls Feltner, who’s an officer in the union.

“There’s no animosity towards the Mexican people at all — they’re just a face to an idea to me,” Feltner said. “But my own union people? It’s disgusting.”

Feltner says one co-worker he talks to every day has agreed to train the Mexican workers. Feltner tried to explain to the man that he was helping the company take away his livelihood. But he couldn’t get the point across. Others, maybe a dozen union workers, also have signed up to be trainers.

“I consider all those people scabs, I really do,” Feltner said. “It’s no different to me if they crossed the picket line.”

The list of insults added to the injury of the looming layoffs seems to have no end for Feltner, who makes the hourlong commute each day from Greenfield, where he lives with his wife, Nina, and two college-age children. A third child is older, out of the nest and has just made John and Nina grandparents.

The Feltners still haven’t fully recovered from John’s last layoff — from diesel motor manufacturer Navistar in 2008.

That was the best job of his life, Feltner said, and some of the best times of it.

He was making $30 an hour. The family had a two-story house in a suburban neighborhood on the east side — “one of the nicest houses on the block,” Feltner said. He had an old truck, but took pride in his custom-built motorcycle. His wife had a new SUV. They had cookouts with neighbors in their big backyard. The kids roamed from yard to yard playing.

Then the ax fell at Navistar. It was unexpected and fell heavy on the Feltners. They got behind on their house payments and soon went to foreclosure. They couldn’t make their car payments. They were bankrupt.

“We lost everything we had,” Feltner said.

As Feltner began looking for work, the family began moving through a series of rental homes, some better than others.

He took a job with an insurance company — as a janitor. He went on to manage their fleet of vehicles, ran purchasing in the mailroom and moved into the loss control department. Eventually, he won a promotion and a transfer — to Texas. The Feltners pulled their kids out of school and moved just outside of Dallas. They knew no one, and Feltner found himself on the road four days a week, traveling a territory that covered six states. “It was tough,” Nina Feltner said. “That was really hard.”

And then the job in Texas dried up. In preparation for being sold, the company began to downsize. And John Feltner took a severance. 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. Down to their last $200, the Feltners moved back to Indiana — job or no job. Not long after they did, Rexnord called back. This time they had a job. And at $25 an hour, the Feltners looked to be back in the game.

It stayed like that for three years. By last summer, the Feltners had accumulated enough cash for a down payment on a house. They had received preapproval for a loan. Enticingly close was the prospect that they would no longer have to pour $1,200 a month for rent down the drain.

“I was just starting to see the light,” Feltner said.

And then, on Oct. 14, Rexnord made its announcement: It was closing the plant.

For all the pain the Navistar experience had caused, the experience of the previous layoff pointed the way for how to respond this time.

After Navistar, the Feltners' oldest son Josh dropped out of school to help support the family. Now, their 21-year-old son Austin decided to take time off from studying criminal justice at Ivy Tech. He now manages a pizza shop.

Their 19-year-old daughter Emily is remaining in school at Indiana State University, but she’s scaling back from her eight-year track toward becoming a veterinarian for a four-year program in nursing. It was Emily’s lifelong dream to be a vet, Nina Feltner said, but the Feltners have always been about putting the family first. “Regardless of anything else,” Nina said, “you’ve got to be there.”

And the biggest financial course change was to forgo the home purchase and stash the down payment. John Feltner hates renting, but he can’t pull the trigger on a house right now, not with so much in the air.

“I’m scared to death,” he said. “It’s tough. And my story is not unique.”

Indeed, there are 350 more of them. Many of the workers have much more time in at Rexnord than Feltner. Some with 30 or 40 years. They’re older and, unlike Feltner, they’ve never faced the upheaval this plant closing has wrought.

How the endgame plays out is unclear. The most common topic of conversation these days is guessing when the jobs will leave. The workers — and their families — seem to have no sharp answers.

“It just leaves everything in a puddle. You’re just in this muddy unknown,” said Nina Feltner. “You can’t get any answers from anywhere.”

The way the severance agreement was drawn up has presented a conundrum as well. Workers who leave before Rexnord is done with them stand to lose six months of free health insurance, a $1,500 bonus and a week’s pay for each year they worked at the plant. Workers with 20 years could lose more than $20,000; some older workers could lose nearly twice that.

It’s a powerful incentive to stay until Rexnord turns out the lights. It’s not helpful at all in moving on to your next job. The union says Rexnord has been unwilling to let people who find new jobs leave early without sacrificing their severance. Even John Feltner, with a relatively meager 3½-year tenure, stands to lose nearly $5,000.

“I’m here until the end,” he said.

The dilemma of the severance, the shadows of Team Monterey, the shipping of their equipment and the dim prospect for work have left Feltner in a surly mood, particularly about Rexnord, which didn’t respond to an interview request.

Feltner admits that he’s bitter.

“The big picture is that American jobs are leaving this country to exploit cheap labor,” he said. “When you start taking away the middle class, what do you have left?”

This is the sentiment that Trump played to so effectively during the 2016 presidential campaign. It spoke to Feltner somewhere down deep. He’d been a loyal union man for years, been raised on the notion Democrats were the party of the working man and made calls for Democrats from union phone banks. But after the trade agreements signed by Democratic presidents, and after Trump spoke to the plight of workers at places such as Carrier, Feltner broke ranks. With the layoff fresh on his mind, he cast a vote in November for Trump. He says most of his rank-and-file union members did the same.

When Trump stepped in to save 750 Carrier jobs that had been bound for Mexico, Feltner allowed himself to hope Trump might save jobs at Rexnord as well. But that hope is all but gone, now. And Feltner is left to wonder how Middle America will endure in the age of offshoring moves such as the one Rexnord is executing.

“They’re just constantly chasing the dollar without thinking how it affects people," he said. "It’s not just 300 people here. You’re talking their families, their kids, local businesses, communities. It’s going to devastate this area. It really is.”

As he and his co-workers have begun boxing up the machinery at Rexnord, Feltner has stepped in – as a union representative – to stop members of Team Monterrey from taking that job, too. But he and the others have also warned their shadow workers — the workers who are about to assume their jobs at a plant in Mexico — about the perils of free trade in the global economy.

“We told the Mexican people if you’re making $3 an hour and somebody over in Vietnam will do it for $1.50 guess what, you’re going to be in the same line we’re in.”

Call IndyStar reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @RbtKing.

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