Even after all this, they still make glass in Plant 1, the plant Ike Collins started, and roughly 900 people still have jobs in Lancaster. But the factory has been poorly maintained and the people who work there have seen their wages and benefits walked back so that now some make just about what they made, or less, adjusted for inflation, than they did back when the saga began. In 1985, that was roughly $10 per hour for a 20-year, high-level employee, or about $22.50 in today’s dollars.

The poor maintenance, the wages and benefits, and the drastic job cuts are only the most obvious costs. The spiritual damage may be more profound. Recently I sat in the small living room of a Lancaster glassman who works in Plant 1 and asked him if he knew which company currently owned Anchor Hocking. The last I knew, after the 2015 bankruptcy the ownership group consisted of former lenders that aren’t in the business of running a glass manufacturer. The company was for sale. I wondered if there’d been some ownership consolidation, and my query to the company went unanswered.

“I think it’s Monomoy,” the glassman said. It wasn’t Monomoy. I wasn’t surprised by his reply, though. Keeping track of who owned what, or even the name of the parent company, is exhausting. Many employees have mentally disconnected from their employer in an effort to tune out the turmoil. None had any idea, for example, of the dividend recapitalizations the company had performed that benefited the private-equity sponsors and increased the company’s debt burden. They had no idea what a dividend recap was. Some didn’t know a CEO had been fired until weeks after the fact. Better, they thought, to put their heads down, do their work, go home, collect a check. If the furnaces were blazing when workers showed up for their shift, they had a job.

“Stability has been replaced by chaos,” Shannon Monnat, a sociologist and demographer at Penn State University who researches the interplay between economics and health, says of such situations. The longer the stress lasts, whether it involves family, community, or work, the more disheartened people become and the more faith they lose in the system, until, finally, they disconnect to survive.

Monnat has recently been studying “diseases of despair”—the plague of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide afflicting places like Lancaster. She’s found that instability at work is strongly correlated with the prevalence of these problems as well as with social and family breakdown. Drug abuse is not solely due to the cheap availability of heroin or meth, nor some imagined weakness of the working class. Monnat believes it’s also caused by people’s loss of faith that they each occupy an important place in the American system.

In Lancaster, the transition from stability to chaos seemed to happen fast, in about three decades, so many can still recall when the city was prosperous and predictable for people like the Plant 1 workers. In those days, the biggest criticism of the town was how boring it was. Lancaster was a cohesive community—a trait not lost entirely, thanks to the devotion many local people still feel—where social classes mixed and executives, from the founders to middle management, all lived in town. Their kids went to school with the factory workers’ kids.