International Harvester: Boom, Strike, and Goodbye

In nineteen twenty two, International Harvester began building a massive truck manufacturing plant on the north side of Fort Wayne. By nineteen twenty three it was producing its first vehicles. Over the next six decades, that plant turned out one million five hundred twenty seven thousand two hundred ninety nine heavy and medium trucks. At its peak in nineteen seventy nine, it employed ten thousand five hundred workers.

For generations of Fort Wayne families, a job at Harvester meant a middle-class life. It meant a house, a car, a pension, and a union card from the United Auto Workers. The plant was large enough that a third of the city's working population depended on it directly or indirectly.

Then came nineteen seventy nine. International Harvester was reporting its most profitable quarter in years, and the UAW went to the table expecting to share in that success. The company demanded concessions instead. On November first, nineteen seventy nine, eight thousand workers walked off the job and picked up picket signs.

The strike lasted one hundred seventy two days. It was one of the longest major industrial strikes in postwar American history. By the time it ended, the recession of nineteen eighty had arrived, and Harvester was hemorrhaging money, eventually reporting losses of three hundred ninety seven million dollars that year.

The company never recovered at Fort Wayne. On September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty two, Harvester announced it would close the plant. On July fifteenth, nineteen eighty three, the last truck rolled off the assembly line. Two thousand one hundred workers lost their jobs at the formal closing, but the actual workforce had been shrinking for years.

The building was eventually demolished. The site was redeveloped. What Harvester left behind was not just unemployment but a city's reckoning with what happens when a single industry goes away and does not come back.