The television age is coming to an end in Bloomington, Indiana. Raised on sweet corn and pot roast, the down-home Midwesterners who work at the local RCA plant could be the parents of the cutting-edge kids in Silicon Valley. And like the limestone under their feet, these working class Hoosiers have dissolved into the American landscape through the labor of their hands: the more than 65 million RCA televisions they've assembled at the factory on South Rogers Street.
Bloomington's TV assembly line - the world's first color television manufacturing facility and still the largest on the planet - first came to life 57 years ago. More recently, as their wages crept ever higher, the factory's 1,100 workers began to think of themselves as high tech assembly operators - until they became the most highly paid television makers in the United States.
But the blue collar dream ended last February, when Thomson Consumer Electronics (which makes the RCA product line) announced that the Bloomington factory will move to Juarez, Mexico, on April 1, 1998. On April Fools' Day, fully 2 percent of the town's workforce will walk off the set of a drama that has aired in Bloomington for generations. Many, like 51-year-old Kenneth Wagner, have worked the same job for more than 30 years. "I started at RCA on November 15, 1965," Wagner recalls. Now a father of four, he has seen friends retire from the same factory where they'd worked since high school.
Things have been shaky at the plant since 1986, when RCA was purchased by General Electric. The following year, GE's consumer electronics brands were bought by Thomson SA, based in France. Despite accumulating some 20 percent of the US television market, Thomson never managed to make its new acquisition profitable. Squeezed between mounting debt and political pressure within France, Thomson was forced to cut costs. With a US$17 differential in hourly wages between Bloomington and Juarez, the company decided to head south.
"The largest single factor is labor costs," says David Hakala, vice president of American manufacturing operations for Thomson, noting that the move will save $350 million over the next 10 years.
"I'm going to miss the people, and maybe the job too," says Wagner. "It's going to be hard to find a job at 52, but things'll work out. They always do."
SCANS
Fade to Black
