Milwaukee was hit hard by deindustrialization in recent decades and the factory closures haven't ended. — Milwaukee was hit hard by deindustrialization in recent decades and the factory closures haven’t ended.

39,000 Lost Jobs Undercut Biden’s Manufacturing Wins

The president is campaigning on an industrial renaissance, but the bounty of jobs hasn’t landed in swing states crucial to his reelection bid.

By Shawn Donnan

Graphics by Christopher Cannon | Photos by Jamie Kelter Davis

March 28, 2024, 5:00 PM EDT

Workers at Milwaukee’s Master Lock Co. factory stood to make $100,000 or more a year just a decade ago as they helped churn out the padlocks that secure America’s school lockers and backyard sheds.

But now the plant signals a soft spot in President Joe Biden’s economic pitch for reelection. That’s because on Friday, Master Lock is shuttering the 85-year-old facility for good, shifting production to Mexico, China and North Carolina and erasing hundreds of union jobs in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

At the core of Biden’s first-term agenda has been a drive to bring middle-class factory jobs home and provide government incentives to reshore strategic industries such as semiconductors. He’s had some success. Since the 2020 pandemic recession, the US economy has regained all the factory jobs it lost—the first time in almost 50 years such a recovery has happened. Some 146,000 more people work in US manufacturing than five years ago, and billions of dollars in subsidies are fueling an investment boom in new factories destined to add even more jobs.

That renaissance, however, has benefited some states more than others. Across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—three key election battleground states with proud industrial pasts—there were still 39,000 fewer people employed in factories in February than five years earlier.

It’s a deficit that, along with inflation, explains why many voters in those states don’t credit Biden for a US economy that, by most metrics, is in historically good shape.

DiAndre Jackson, who worked at Master Lock for about a decade and a half, knows well how the fortunes of such factories can carry immense political symbolism. In 2012 he introduced President Barack Obama during a visit to celebrate jobs returning from China. At that point “we were running at over 100% capacity for a long time,” he says. “We worked so much overtime.”

For Jackson that’s now just a memory. He lost his job in October when the company started shutting down.

tktktk — Left: Top: President Barack Obama shaking hands with worker DiAndre Jackson at the Master Lock plant on February 15, 2012; photo: Brian Kersey/UPI/Shutterstock. Right: Above: Master Lock’s signature product; photo: Jeffrey Phelps/AP Photo.

His fate, along with the demise of the Master Lock plant, illustrates the thorny aspects of politicking on industrial policy: Not everyone wins, and old urban production facilities often struggle to compete or can’t be refitted for a new generation of manufacturing. Efforts to revitalize the sites they occupy can move at a glacial pace. These days the new factory jobs are mostly springing up in exurban farm fields in the South and West rather than the Midwestern city communities that have lost so many in recent decades.

And that could have political consequences come November, especially in a state like Wisconsin, which was decided by only 20,682 votes in 2020.

Watch: The Race to Prove Bidenomics Is Working

‘A Functional Museum’

Few industrial cities matter more politically this year than Milwaukee. Besides being a reliable pot of votes for Democrats in Wisconsin, the city will host the Republican convention in July, at which Donald Trump will formally be anointed as the party’s candidate.

In visits in March and December, Biden argued his economic agenda is benefiting places hit by deindustrialization and the policies of the past.

“We’re making sure Milwaukee is coming back—and all of Milwaukee coming back,” he said.

Milwaukee, WI

Population, 2022

563,305

Population change, 2010–2022

–5.3%

Black share of population

38.6%

White median household income

$64,810

Black median household income

$35,011

White/Black unemployment rate

1.9% / 9.3%

Many former factory sites in Milwaukee are surrounded by residential neighborhoods.

In particular, Biden mentioned what’s known as the 30th Street Industrial Corridor, a strip where once-thriving factories including Master Lock’s drew thousands of Black families from the American South as part of the 20th century Great Migration. The corridor, Biden announced in December, is a finalist for a $50 million federal grant to rehabilitate old factory sites and create new apprenticeships.

But that investment isn’t guaranteed, and its effects wouldn’t be immediate. And in the meantime, voters are seeing a bulwark of the corridor close up shop.

A spokesperson for Master Lock’s corporate parent, Fortune Brands Innovations Inc., said Milwaukee production was shifting to “our other North American and global manufacturing operations as well as external suppliers.” The company said the decision was meant to “enhance our supply chain resilience, maximize potential growth of the business and maintain our competitiveness.”

Union officials say the move follows years of neglect, in which Fortune Brands chose not to invest in the plant or replace aging machinery.

Sources: US Census Bureau, Milwaukee Department of City Development

“It’s a functional museum,” says Mike Bink, who followed his father to work at Master Lock at age 18 and ended up there for 45 years, eventually leading United Auto Workers Local 469, which represents the company’s Milwaukee employees.

Fortune Brands won’t say what’s next for the 26-acre site, and city officials say they don’t know.

“This kind of factory closure is exactly the reason President Biden is investing in communities that have been hollowed out by Congressional Republicans’ trickle-down economics,” White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa said in a statement. The $50 million grant that Milwaukee is a finalist for would create “good-paying jobs and economic opportunity,” he said. “This manufacturing boom is disproportionately benefiting communities that have too often been left behind—like Milwaukee’s 30th Street Corridor.”

The challenge of attracting an employer to replace Master Lock is partly physical. The 30th Street corridor’s industrial sites sit up against residential neighborhoods. Its buildings are old, and the truck routes are too long a drive from the interstate for logistics giants such as Amazon.com Inc.

The area has also been plagued by the perception that it’s a wasteland riddled with social problems, says Cheryl Blue, who runs the 30th Street Industrial Corridor Corp., a community nonprofit working to reinvigorate the area dotted with underused so-called brownfield sites. The group has rehabbed vacant houses and undertaken other improvement projects. Lately it’s focusing on reconnecting the corridor to the rest of Milwaukee, whether via a new bike trail to join a network serving White neighborhoods or getting an underemployed young population to suburban well-paid jobs.

“We do a lot of remediation of brownfields,” Blue says. “How about some remediation of the people, too?”

Cheryl Blue, executive director of Milwaukee's 30th Street Industrial Corridor Corp., stands in a vacant field in the corridor she and others are working to revitalize. — Cheryl Blue, executive director of Milwaukee’s 30th Street Industrial Corridor Corp., stands in a vacant field in the corridor she and others are working to revitalize.

Slow Transformation

There’s a nearby example of how revitalization can work: the Menomonee River Valley. What used to be a smelly home to dilapidated tanneries and slaughterhouses is now bounded by the Milwaukee Brewers’ baseball stadium on one side and the Harley-Davidson Museum on the other. In between sit factories turning out frozen pizzas, furniture and wind turbine components.

Biden visited the Menomonee River Valley and Ingeteam, the Spanish company making the turbine parts and plotting to expand into EV charging stations, in August to highlight the green factory jobs being created by the Inflation Reduction Act. “Instead of exporting American jobs, we’re creating American jobs and exporting American products. And they’re being built right here in Wisconsin and places where factories had been shut down,” he said at the time.

But even closer to the Master Lock site is a case study for how daunting—and slow-moving—these efforts can be.

When Factories Leave

Milwaukee’s former A.O. Smith factory site once provided more than 10,000 jobs but remains mostly vacant 15 years after the city acquired it.

Circa 1960 2022

Sources: Historic Photo Collection/Milwaukee Public Library, Google Earth

The city in 2009 acquired an 86-acre site that was once home to the A.O. Smith company and as many as 10,000 employees building car frames and other parts.

Most of the old buildings were demolished, and the site now houses a small industrial park, a public works department depot and a Spanish company building railcars.

Altogether, some 15 years after the city took over the former A.O. Smith site, roughly 500 people are employed there, according to Benji Timm, who runs the 30th Street Industrial Corridor project for Milwaukee. If all goes to plan, he says, that might rise to 2,000 to 3,000.

“It would be awesome if it all happened overnight, but that’s not the way the world works,” Timm says.

The Biden administration’s idea is that focused federal help for such distressed areas as the 30th Street Industrial Corridor will seed investment. But Timm has been working to restore industrial sites with federal help since 2006, when George W. Bush was president, and it’s hard to battle against global forces of economic change, no matter who’s in the White House.

The reality is that some less advanced manufacturing work—like the kind done at Master Lock—isn’t coming back, says Edward “Ned” Hill, a professor of economic development at Ohio State University.

“That’s political suicide to say it out loud, but it’s true,” Hill says.

Missing Manufacturing Investments

There’s plenty of grist for Biden’s economic case to Wisconsin voters. While its manufacturing employment is down from five years ago, the comparison to four years ago looks sunnier, with narrow gains in the sector since February 2020.

Unemployment in metro Milwaukee is not far off record lows. The city is experiencing a construction boom, particularly in luxury apartment towers.

“There’s a ribbon-cutting or a groundbreaking around here constantly,” says Cavalier Johnson, who in 2022 became Milwaukee’s first elected Black mayor.

But largely missing are the jobs-rich manufacturing investments needed for long-term economic transformation, or the multibillion-dollar semiconductor and electric-vehicle projects that are high-profile symbols elsewhere of Biden’s industrial policies.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson in his office at City Hall.

In June 2022, Japanese heavy machinery company Komatsu Ltd. opened a production complex in Milwaukee that was slated to add some 400 jobs. But the $285 million investment was announced in 2018, and nothing on that scale has followed in the Biden years.

White House data doesn’t list a single major private-sector manufacturing investment announcement in Milwaukee since Biden took office. The closest is a $170 million project with a footprint in suburban New Berlin, which is about a 25-minute drive west of the mayor’s office and has a median household income almost twice the city’s.

Which helps explain why Johnson called the Master Lock closure a “slap in the face” when it was first announced in May 2023.

Johnson grew up with an aunt employed at Master Lock and living in ZIP codes around the plant. The shutdown isn’t just personal, though. It’s a blow to Johnson’s efforts to spread the economic recovery beyond the city’s whiter and wealthier lakeside neighborhoods.

“I’m interested in adding family-supporting jobs,” Johnson says. “Manufacturing jobs are extremely important.”

Source: US Census Bureau
*Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha counties

Milwaukee’s investment pattern fits a national trend documented in a recent Brookings Institution study. Based on population, distressed urban areas haven’t seen their fair share of investment under Biden while land-rich exurban “micropolitan” areas have disproportionately benefited, the researchers found.

In Milwaukee, manufacturing has moved not just overseas but also to the suburbs. According to Marc Levine, a University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee economic development expert, 80% to 90% of factory jobs in the metro area were once in the city. In recent years the city’s share has fallen to less than a quarter, census data shows.

That’s contributed to Milwaukee’s Black population ranking near the bottom nationally on numerous economic and social metrics, Levine says.

There’s been incremental improvement. The city’s Black poverty rate fell from 33% in 2018 to 30% in 2022. But “Milwaukee remains the most deeply distressed city in the country for African Americans,” Levine says, and the continuing departure of manufacturing jobs is a major reason.

Source: US Census Bureau, 2018–2022 ACS 5-year estimates

Trump’s Record

It may help Biden that Trump has weaknesses in his own argument that he’s a champion for American manufacturing.

Under Trump, US manufacturing employment reached a 12.8 million peak in January 2019. By January 2020—before the pandemic’s toll—it was already down by 43,000 jobs, almost 20,000 of them in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin alone. One in four of the factory jobs lost when the pandemic hit was in those three states.

Some of the very swing-state factories Trump chose to highlight his own manufacturing renaissance are also shutting down.

Trump marked his 100th day in office in 2017 with a visit to an Ames Cos. wheelbarrow factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during which he proclaimed: “We believe in ‘Made in the USA,’ and it’s coming back stronger and better and faster than even I thought.”

That plant, though, is closing, along with another nearby, with 239 jobs lost. Ames’ corporate parent, Griffon Corp., says it’s shifting production to Asia and Latin America.

In Wisconsin, which has lost almost 120,000 factory jobs since 2000, voters have been promised rebirth for years by multiple presidents. Trump hailed a $10 billion Foxconn plant that never delivered, points out Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. The good news for Biden may be that “perhaps the recent decline doesn’t hit with as much force” as larger job losses in the 1990s and early 2000s, he says.

The original A.O. Smith Corporation headquarters is surrounded by vacant land in the 30th Street Industrial Corridor.

Union Jobs

Biden’s manufacturing efforts are very deliberately about union jobs. That’s another reason the Master Lock factory closure hurts: In Milwaukee’s relatively healthy economy, the laid-off workers can find another job, but they’re unlikely to find one with union pay and benefits.

Jackson, the plant worker let go in October, is looking to make politics his next chapter. He’s running for alderman in a district near the Master Lock plant, under the slogan “From the factory floor to City Hall.”

Labor endorsements helped Jackson, a leader of the city’s Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, win February’s primary by 131 votes.

Former plant worker and current alderman candidate DiAndre Jackson.

The UAW chapter that represented the Master Lock workers, Local 469, has long flexed its political muscle on behalf of Democrats up and down the ballot. But the death of the factory also means the demise of its union local, a driver of turnout in a city where getting voters to the polls will be crucial for Biden.

Bink, its recently retired president, says Local 469 laid the groundwork for its political overtures by giving Christmas presents at a local elementary school and helping food banks and women’s shelters.

Bink has plans for an alumni UAW chapter. It’s unclear, though, if that will work or yield the same political energy. “You know how hard it is to get people to do political work,” he says.

39,000 Lost Jobs Undercut Biden’s Manufacturing Wins

The president is campaigning on an industrial renaissance, but the bounty of jobs hasn’t landed in swing states crucial to his reelection bid.

Factory Jobs

A Split Renaissance