A Steelworkers’ Local in New England

Thirty years ago, many of the workers at Sullivan Machine Company—now the Claremont, New Hampshire, Division of Joy Manufacturing—walked to work. They would leave their three-story wooden tenements or one- and two-family homes in their working-class neighborhood—or, as the Wasps would say, “the French-Canadian” or “Polish” sections—some 10 or 15 minutes before they had to clock in at the red-brick five-story factory. Today, they drive to the southwestern corner of this small city where pneumatic construction and extraction equipment is manufactured in a long, one-level, new, shed-like structure sheathed in blue sheet metal, reminiscent of an airplane hangar. As the morning mist rises along the wooded road ...