Elkhart union, and workers, are left broken

updated 2:00 p.m. ET Oct. 18, 2009

ELKHART, Ind. - By 10:30 a.m. the lot fronting Disabled American Veterans Post 19 is nearly full and a table spread with potato salad and Port-a-Pit chicken beckons.

The only thing missing, mutters one of the workers, is a banner: "Welcome to Our Last Supper."

This gathering marks the end of a 40-month fight over who owns the craftsmanship that gives life to a factory floor. These men and women have logged decades making trumpets of such sinuous precision they are called the Stradivarius of brass.

In the end, though, there is no music.

"Lord God, you know what the plan is for our lives," Bertha Carpenter prays as fellow workers bow their heads. "And let us be ever grateful."

This is the story of a decision — of 234 workers, one company and countless consequences.

Back when times were good, many Americans made decisions that seemed like sure things. Millions gambled their homes, betting prices could only go up. Others bet their retirement security on the stock market.

But workers at the Vincent Bach factory bet on what seemed more modest expectations. When they walked out on strike, they had no get-rich-quick illusions. At best, the thinking went, if they stuck together they'd keep hold of their prized rung on the economic ladder.

Today that bet is being called.

But like Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for 20 years and came back to a place he barely recognized, the men and women of Bach return to a vastly different landscape than the one they left behind.

A poster child
Over the last year, Elkhart has become a poster child for the recession.

Millions across the country lost jobs, but Elkhart was slammed by the nation's largest jump in unemployment. Many of the factories that made it the capital of recreational vehicle manufacturing shut down. Twice since election, President Obama has come to Elkhart County to spotlight economic despair.

But this story begins in a very different Elkhart, singled out by a Federal Reserve economist in 2006 as one of the Midwest's "jewels in the rust." Unemployment then hovered just above 4 percent and the RV plants were hiring.

But at the Bach factory there was little talk of going elsewhere for a paycheck.

The place was like a big family, workers say, and it's no exaggeration.

Stacy Curtis followed her dad in to Bach, where she met husband, Steve, one of the buffers blanketed in red dust her father supervised. Brad Milliken hired in as a janitor at 17 when his dad put the good word in, then did the same for younger brother, John.

Job openings at Bach were guarded like secrets. In a town with 45 percent of all jobs in factories, Bach paid near the top. The average worker made $21 an hour.

But the family sensibility went beyond the paychecks. On Fridays, workers circled around covered-dish lunches on the shop floor. On birthdays, they serenaded each other on whatever instrument was within reach.

Bach was equally bound by pride. In the music world, Vincent Bach is synonymous with cornets, trombones and, especially, trumpets.

"Once you got done with an instrument," Jeff Hoogenboom says, "it was like a jewel."

That pride reached back to the 1920s when the original Bach, an Austrian immigrant, set up shop in New York. He was so certain of his trumpets' superiority he named them for the world's most legendary instrument.

Bach sold his company in 1961. The new owner moved it to Elkhart, which, by the 1970s, supplied 40 percent of the world's band instruments. But the company and the world around it began to change.

In 1993, two investment bankers acquired Bach's parent firm, then merged it with famed piano maker Steinway & Sons, creating the nation's largest musical instrument manufacturer.

The new owners pushed to speed production. They eliminated the plant's saxophone line. The company earned $13.8 million in 2005. But executives were wary of Chinese producers, whose $200 trumpets targeted the large student market.

The company would not comment for this story, but its demands were clear. On the final day of their contract in March 2006, every worker received a letter from president John Stoner. Bach was losing money on student instruments. An Asian manufacturer could take over for a fraction of the cost.

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