When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. He needed something stable. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. “Either I’ll be working at General Motors or I’ll be working at Steelcase by the end of the year,” he vowed in 1984. A few months later, he got a job at Steelcase, the world’s largest manufacturer of office furniture, and he’s been working at its Grand Rapids metal plant ever since.

Stinson is now fifty-eight. He has a full, reddish face, a thick head of silver hair, and a majestic midsection. His navy polo shirt displays his job title—“Zone Leader”—and, like everyone else in the plant, he always has a pair of protective earplugs on a neon string draped around his neck. His glasses have plastic shields on the sides that give him the air of a cranky scientist.

“I don’t regret coming here,” Stinson said. We were sitting in the plant’s cafeteria, and Stinson was unwrapping an Italian sub, supplied by a deli that every Thursday offers plant workers sandwiches for four dollars instead of eight. “There’s been times I’ve thought about leaving, but it’s just getting to be a much more comfortable atmosphere around here. The technology is really helping that kind of thing, too. Instead of taking responsibility away from you, it’s a big aid. It’s definitely the wave of the future here.”

William Sandee, Jr., a sixty-four-year-old worker on the paint line, sat down next to Stinson with a carton of fries and a cup of ketchup, and tossed his safety goggles on the table. “We try to have some fun with it,” he said in a low near-growl. “It can get intense.”

Sandee, who has neatly combed gray hair and an alert, owlish face, began working at Steelcase in 1972, after waiting in line with six hundred people just to put in an application. “They made it very lucrative to be a Steelcase employee, back in the day,” Sandee said. Plant managers were known to drive fancy cars and have second homes on the lake; the company paid the college tuition for employees’ children, who often spent summers working at the local plants; and there were company picnics and a bowling tournament, which once had fifteen hundred players. (The tournament is still held, now with around three hundred participants.)

In the nineties, Steelcase employed more than ten thousand workers in the United States and operated seven factories around Grand Rapids, making chairs, filing cabinets, desks, and tables, and the screws, bolts, and casters that went into them. Packed shoulder to shoulder, workers polished and painted wood and assembled steel parts by hand. Today, there are only two Steelcase plants in Michigan—the metal factory, which makes desks and filing cabinets, and a nearby “wood plant,” which produces wood furniture. In total, they employ fewer than two thousand workers. The company’s only other U.S. plant, in Athens, Alabama, employs a thousand full-time workers.

The history of Steelcase, in many ways, is the history of manufacturing in America. The company was founded in 1912 with one product, a fireproof metal wastebasket. As the economy boomed in the following decades, America’s burgeoning corporations needed to furnish their offices with desks and shelving and cubicle walls. “If you were a high-school kid growing up in Grand Rapids in the eighties and you didn’t want to go to college, and you got a job at a Steelcase factory, you were set,” Rob Kirkbride, who covered Steelcase for almost two decades at the Grand Rapids Press and industry publications, told me. “It was like winning the lottery.”

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Then the dot-com bubble burst and countless startups found themselves auctioning off their office furniture. By 2001, Steelcase had lost a third of its sales and started closing plants throughout western Michigan. Its manufacturing was moved to Mexico, China, and eventually India. In 2011, the company announced a new series of closings and layoffs, shutting another plant near Grand Rapids, one in Texas, and one in Ontario, Canada. Almost all the company’s chair manufacturing was relocated to Mexico.

These days, as U.S. companies report record profits and demand millions of sleek new workspaces, Steelcase is again on the upswing. Its corporate headquarters, housed in a refurbished factory, is a laboratory of workplace trends, with open floor plans and glass-sheathed work pods where people recline with their laptops or hover at standing desks. In the two Michigan plants that remain open, employees create metal components for furniture sets and conference tables in dozens of shades of wood veneer.

As technology is making the work faster, more efficient, and more environmentally sound, the products are being created with far fewer workers. “Companies are obviously not sending out press releases saying, ‘We’re not hiring more people,’ but that’s what I hear on the street,” Kirkbride said. There are automated assembly lines, and robotic arms lifting tabletops that were once hauled by men. Stinson took me across a dense wall of machinery and past a giant contraption that makes cardboard boxes so that the plant doesn’t have to order them. “You can just punch it into the touch screen there and go, I need 86-17, boom-boom-boom, I need fourteen of ’em. Hit the button, and it cuts it for you,” he said. “That kind of stuff is really cool. So it isn’t so much that we’re eliminating jobs, we’re eliminating the waste.”

As a zone leader, Stinson is responsible for about fifteen employees on a section of the production line that makes parts for Steelcase’s Ology series—height-adjustable tables built for the standing-desk craze. Until last year, the plant workers had to consult a long list of steps, taking pains to remove the correct parts out of a cart filled with variously sized bolts and screws and pins and to insert each one in the correct hole and in the correct order. Now computerized workstations, called “vision tables,” dictate, step by step, how workers are to assemble a piece of furniture. The process is virtually mistake-proof: the system won’t let the workers proceed if a step isn’t completed correctly. We stood behind a young woman wearing a polo shirt and Lycra shorts, with a long blond ponytail. When a step was completed, a light turned on above the next required part, accompanied by a beep-beep-whoosh sound. A scanner overhead tracked everything as it was happening, beaming the data it collected to unseen engineers with iPads. Employees who follow a strict automated protocol—some call them “meat robots”—need little training. Even the drill was attached to a computer-assisted arm; the worker just had to move it to the right position and let the machine do its magic. A decade ago, industrial robots assisted workers in their tasks. Now workers—those who remain—assist the robots in theirs.

For decades, the conventional view among economists was that technological advances create as many opportunities for workers as they take away. In the past several years, however, research has begun to suggest otherwise. “It’s not that we’re running out of work or jobs per se,” David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the impact of automation on employment, said. “But a subset of people with low skill levels may not be able to earn a reasonable standard of living based on their labor. We see that already.” As automation depresses wages, jobs in factories become both less abundant and less appealing.