Millions of workers walked through the factory gates every morning. With the well paid work, generations was growing up with the belief in the American Dream: That your generation will be better off than the previous one. That you will be able to afford your own house with a garden, a car, vacations and education for your kids. This dream made the US to a dream in itself.
Then it became silent.
The factories closed their doors and millions of industrial jobs were lost.
Today, whole communities have turned into ghost towns. The unemployment rate is soaring many places and well paid jobs have been replaced by work in the so-called service sector, work that only pay minimum wages. Many need two or three jobs to be able to cope. Others don't have work at all.
46 million Americans lives below the porverty line. This has created huge social challenges. The Blue Collar America, the working middle class, has become much poorer, the few rich ones has become extremly rich. This has created anger among many Americans, anger that Donald Trump is benefitting from in the ongoing presidential primaries.
What happened to the world's most powerful industry giant?
For the last three years I have, together with writer Roy F. Andersen, travelled through the former US Rust Belt. From Chicago to Detroit, to Youngstown and Beckley ending up in New York. The area where the car industry created the middle class, where the worlds leading steel was produced and where the black gold, the coal, made families able to build their own homes.
We have met firefighters, fastfood workers, Vietnam veterans, gangs members, unemployed, musicians, industry workers, coal miners, people who still believe in the American Dream – and many who have lost their hope. This is the people who struggles to keep the American Dream alive: The Middle Class, the unemployed, the new poor and the workers on low or minimum wage.
We investigate what has happened to the former middle class, and the consequences of low income, unemployment, drugs and flight from the former industrial towns. We have also meet people who are fighting back and visited communities that have a drive for turning things around.
Read more on the HardLand website.