Bill Bodani Jr. spent most of his adult life working at Bethlehem Steel, just outside Baltimore.
Around the year 2000, an injury on the job forced him into early retirement in his mid-50s. Not too long after that, Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and was finally dissolved in 2003. Bodani’s pension was eventually slashed from $3,000 to $1,600 a month. At 69 years old he was forced to take a job as a forklift driver at an Amazon warehouse, located in the same place the old steel mill used to sit, where he was paid roughly $12 an hour, a steep drop from his previous wage of $35 an hour.
Regional inequality has deepened across the country.
By Alec MacGillis
Mr. MacGillis is the author of a forthcoming book on how Amazon has changed the economy of American cities. He lives in Baltimore.
March 9, 2021
Credit.Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse Getty Images
When I set out to report a book on the problem of growing regional inequality in America, I did not expect that it would involve spending several hours on a cold winter day standing inside a large dumpster.
But there I was, helping a man named Keith Taylor toss all manner of trash from a giant receptacle to reach the treasure buried below: hundreds of bricks from the demolished headquarters of the sprawling Bethlehem Steel plant on Sparrows Point peninsula outside Baltimore.