What do highly educated upper-middle-class people know about the life of blue collar workers? Farah Stockman, a graduate of Harvard, journalist and member of the New York Times editorial board, believes that the answer to that question for most upper-middle-class people, including herself, is not much.
Stockman admits in her book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears that she was a “faculty brat” — her parents were tenured professors — who didn’t know much about working-class people. That changed when she traveled to Indianapolis on a three-year assignment to observe workers in the Link-Belt factory that produced steel bearings. She embedded herself in the lives of three workers, Raleigh “Wally” Hall, an African American; Shannon Mulcahy, a white woman; and John Feltner, a white male and United Steelworkers vice president at the factory.
