Johnsonville Sausage employs about 1,000 people, double the number it did two decades ago, and its campus is a flurry of backhoes and construction pick-ups as it expands its facilities. Johnsonville benefited from NAFTA and other trade agreements—the lower tariffs made it easier to ship Wisconsin-made sausages to countries overseas, in turn creating more jobs in the U.S.

Because it’s still family owned, Johnsonville isn’t as focused on dividends as a public company might be. “We’re looking at what does the company look like in 10 years, not what does the company look like next quarter,” said Michael Stayer-Suprick, who is the company’s president and the grandson of Ralph and Alice Stayer.

Other family-owned business include the cabinet-maker Richardson Industries, Wigwam Mills, Sargento Foods, Plastic Engineering Company (PLENCO), Bemis Manufacturing Company, Masters Gallery Foods and Kohler, which has been in Sheboygan County since 1873. Having these companies in town means that there are jobs, and also that there is investment in the community. A handful of companies, for instance, dismayed by what students were learning about manufacturing at the local schools, created a partnership with a local technical college and the public school district called Red Raider Manufacturing, and are building advanced manufacturing workshops with new equipment at local high schools.

Sheboygan, and much of Wisconsin, also has a history of strong unions, which helped keep wages high, according to Tamarine Cornelius of the Wisconsin Budget Project, a nonprofit that researches state tax and budget priorities. In addition, the state has traditionally invested heavily in its public-education system, which has “really underwritten our middle class,” Cornelius said.

The good schools and strong unions of Sheboygan helped Bob Bastasic and his wife raise three children on just one salary. Bastasic started working at Kohler 36 years ago, and though he had just a high school diploma, he made $7.25 an hour, which works out to roughly $21 an hour in today’s dollars. He paid nothing for health care, dental, or vision, and slowly worked his way up in the company. While he was working in the enamel shop at Kohler, his wife was raising their three children, driving them around the state so they could play sports. His daughter is now an elementary-school teacher, and his sons both went into the Marines. Bastasic now makes almost $34 an hour, and owns a home near Sheboygan’s Field of Dreams. “We were able to sustain a household on my job,” he said. “You can’t find that today.”

Still, even family-owned companies have to stay competitive. For every company like Johnsonville Sausage that is able to expand because of the benefits of trade and globalization, there are others that are shrinking. For example, the county’s biggest employer, Kohler, used to employ around 4,500 people in its local factory, and is now down to 2,300, according to Timothy Tayloe, the president of United Auto Workers Local 833, which represents manufacturing workers at Kohler. When the housing market slumped, causing the recession, Kohler saw less demand for its housing fixtures and appliances, and laid off hundreds of people. In 2010, in order to keep jobs in the region, Kohler asked the union to agree to a two-tier pay structure in which new employees made about half of what old-timers made. The union agreed—the alternative was watching jobs leave the region, Tayloe said. In December 2015, as a new contract was being negotiated, the union pushed back against the two-tier structure. But Kohler again said it couldn’t afford to keep jobs in the region at the old wages.