What the closing did to the households

1991–1998 · PENSIONS, BENEFITS, AND THE WORKFORCE'S AFTERLIFE

The Ball Band works closed by stages — the footwear transfer of 1968–70, the lines sold off after 1985, the doors shut in 1997 — and the banked Ball Band article tells that course as the plant's. What it did to the households is a separate record, and it runs through two federal files: a pension file and a court file. It is told here from those files and from the press, at the size they carry it.

The pension: The works' last owner of substance was Uniroyal Plastics, by then part of the Jesup Group. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's release of July 21, 1992 (No. 92-41) records what happened to the retirement the Ball Band households had been promised. Jesup had made only partial payments on its pension obligations in 1989, 1990 and 1991; six of its subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy in December 1991; and the Uniroyal Plastics pension plan was terminated on February 20, 1992, holding assets of $7.5 million against benefit liabilities of about $164 million — underfunded by $157 million. The PBGC took the plan over because, in its director's words, the company "will not be able to make all of its July benefit payments." The plan covered 5,300 workers and retirees, of whom about 3,000 were already retired, and the release states where those households were: "The majority of retirees are located in Mishawaka/South Bend, IN." Federal guarantee law capped what the PBGC could pay — for a 1992 termination, a maximum of $28,227.24 a year for a participant retiring at 65 on a straight life annuity — and the agency's assurance was the measured one that "most retirees will receive the same benefits they are now getting," which is to say the guarantee held for most and the record does not pretend it held for all.

The benefits, and the end of the works: The retirees' medical and life insurance had been carved out in the 1985–86 unwinding of Uniroyal: the federal court that later heard the city's suit records that Uniroyal Holding was assigned "medical and life insurance benefits for retirees of Uniroyal's previously discontinued businesses," and that a liquidating trust provided for the pensions and insurance benefits of Uniroyal retirees for over a decade before it was terminated in 1997, Uniroyal Holding then assuming its assets and liabilities. The same opinion fixes the works' end: "On April 1, 1997, industrial operations came to a halt" at the Hill Street site — 43 acres, 58 buildings, 1.7 million square feet, a plant that at its height had employed nearly 10,000. The city leased the site in August 1998 and bought it from the Plastics bankruptcy trustee; the Environmental Protection Agency spent more than $1.5 million on the cleanup, and the 1999 settlement brought $100,000, half of it to Mishawaka.

The households themselves: What those files meant at kitchen-table size, the press of record shows in glimpses. The South Bend Tribune reported on May 28, 1998, in the cleanup-and-demolition season: "During its heyday, Uniroyal employed about 10,000 workers. Hundreds of them still live in Mishawaka." And the pension's afterlife ran for decades in individual houses: Ivan Butcher, who had come north from southern Illinois after Navy service in the Second World War because, in the Tribune's telling, he "saw all the open Uniroyal jobs in Mishawaka at the time as offering a better life," worked thirty years at the plant, mostly on a line that made fuel cells for missiles. When he died on November 6, his widow Erma — married to him for 63 years — filed for her survivor's pension at once and then waited, through months of unanswered applications and 800-number calls, until the Tribune's columnist took the case to the PBGC in May; a FedEx letter of apology arrived May 21, the back check on May 23, and regular payments from June 1. The system's machinery worked, eventually, at the speed of a newspaper's intervention. No household-level accounting beyond these glimpses — no survey of the workforce's wages after the plant, its out-migration, or its losses house by house — was reached; that is a named gap, and its settler is the Tribune's closing retrospectives in the Mishawaka–Penn–Harris Public Library's Heritage Center collection, read with the PBGC's plan records.

Sources:

1. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, news release No. 92-41, July 21, 1992 — the takeover of the Uniroyal Plastics (Jesup Group) plan: $157 million underfunding, $7.5 million in assets against about $164 million in liabilities at the February 20, 1992 termination, 5,300 participants of whom about 3,000 retired, the July payments at risk, the 1992 guarantee maximum, and the majority of retirees located in Mishawaka/South Bend.
2. City of Mishawaka v. Uniroyal Holding, Inc., Opinion and Order, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana, Cause No. 3:04-CV-125 CAN, February 26, 2009 — the assignment of retiree medical and life insurance benefits, the liquidating trust's decade of provision and its 1997 termination, the Plastics bankruptcy of December 1991, the halt of operations on April 1, 1997, and the site's purchase and cleanup course.
3. South Bend Tribune, May 28, 1998 (carried in the Troubled Company Reporter, June 1, 1998) — "hundreds of them still live in Mishawaka."
4. Virginia Black, South Bend Tribune column (ndinsider.com) — the Erma and Ivan Butcher pension case, whole.