Tom Casciato: There's really only one way to bring people into a story like this. And that's through the personal stories of someone who's living it. So, we start the film right away in 1991, when two young families have recently suffered layoffs, one from Briggs and Stratton in the Neumann family and one each for the parents in the Stanley family from Briggs and Stratton and A.O. Smith, two venerable American manufacturing companies, which were real staples of hiring in Milwaukee. And I think getting to know these people is getting to know the global economy almost without your knowing you're getting to know about the global economy.
Kathleen Hughes: By 1990-1991, there'd already been massive upheaval. Manufacturing jobs were being sent down south to non-union states, to Mexico, and were beginning to find their way overseas. American manufacturing companies were just looking to cut labor costs, and they were doing what they could do. Technology was also changing. So, workers in the, what we now call the Rust Belt states, were trying to figure out what was next. And many of them were being told, you know, you can retrain for a new service economy, there's a bright future ahead. We'll figure this out.
Tom Casciato: And it's important, I think, to understand, or I should say, it's easy to forget that when we started in 1991, it was before the North American Free Trade Agreement. People often point to NAFTA correctly as something that led to a lot of job loss, but the job loss started long before then, and it continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Patrick Center: You're working with Bill Moyers on this. How do you end up in Milwaukee? How do you meet the Stanleys and the Neumanns.
Kathleen Hughes: We had just done a lot of research. There was a lot of competing notions about where these workers would land. There was even talk about how people would maybe only work three days a week because of technology. And one thing led to another, and we started to understand that, well, people were going to just be working for a lot less money, it seemed.
Tom Casciato: Yeah, it seemed like there was a point where there was talk about what are American workers going to do with all their leisure time because technology is going to make it so you can earn a living much more easily.
Kathleen Hughes: Right, and I got Robert Reich, who at that point was a professor at Harvard on the phone one day, and Robert Reich would later go on to be Bill Clinton's labor secretary. But he said to me, you know, I just wrote this book about the way our economy is changing. And what I'm seeing is that we're growing in a way that we have kind of the top 80% doing okay and the bottom of the economy starting to not do okay. And the center is what's bleeding out and we're just losing our middle. And if I were you, I might go to a Midwestern city like Cleveland or Milwaukee and meet up with some folks who have recently lost their jobs. And that's essentially what led us out to Milwaukee. Tom went out and met up with the union folks at Briggs and Stratton.
Tom Casciato: It was Kathy's decision that we would work in Milwaukee and I was the one who went out there and I met with a union representative who was trying to help a lot of laid off workers, recently laid off workers, retrain, look for other work. And he set me up with meetings kind of all day. I met with about 80 laid off union workers, Briggs and Stratton workers, in groups of about 20. And I just sat up in front of the room and I said, which I say at the beginning of every project, if you all were going to turn on the TV tonight and you were going to see a documentary film about your lives and what you're going through, what would you want to see portrayed? What are the realities? What are the myths? And that's a great way to get people talking and to get them to tell their stories and to make sure that when we do start filming, we're telling their stories rather than imposing our views on them and trying to make them into something we want to say. And the Neumanns, Tony Neumann, and Jackie Stanley were among those 80 workers I met that day. And I just found them to be very compelling narrators of their own life stories. You know, everybody's an expert on their own life. And some people just put it across in a way that to Kathy and me that we meet them and we think they would be good on television. It's not always, are you the best looking? Are you the most articulate in a traditional fashion? Are you talking in sound bites? In fact, we do not like people who talk in sound bites for our films. We like people who have conversations in our films. And they were just very compelling and interesting people. They both invited me to their homes. I met their spouses. I met their kids. We established a relationship and I said, hey, do you want to be in a documentary? And they agreed. And at that point, Kathy and I never, ever imagined we would do anything other than make the first film we made in this series, which aired in 1992, was called Minimum Wages: The New Economy. We were just making a one-off documentary and that was it.
Patrick Center: Didn't turn out that way, did it?
Kathleen Hughes: And they were generous enough to let us back into their lives every time, which we are eternally grateful for. And we're not sugarcoating their stories. I think they feel that it's important to share what's happened to them. They know their individuals and everybody's lives are different, but they've heard from enough people by now that people outside of these families see themselves in these families. And they, I think, feel like they're helping us all have a conversation about what's going on.
Patrick Center: What was revealed when it comes to the U.S. economy?
Tom Casciato: What the film reveals is that for people like Jackie and Claude Stanley, who are in their 70s, and Tony and Terry Neumann, who are in their 60s, as far as really ever making it into what we would call the middle-class and having the American dream. They're a lost generation. They didn't get it. And now it's too late for them to get it. They had a foothold or maybe it was a toehold in it in the 1980s with well-paying union jobs at major American manufacturers. And they had an expectation that they would have a middle-class life and the life of an American dream. It doesn't mean they've had bad lives. It doesn't mean they don't have love in their lives and friendship in their lives and fellowship in their lives. And people who watch the film will see a lot of great stuff as well as the economic difficulties. But it just shows that I think if you were born at a certain time, you didn't make it the way you thought you would make it. As far as their kids go and now grandkids, we can't write the future. We don't know what's going to happen to them.
Kathleen Hughes: One of the things we've observed is that they have persevered. They have never given up. It's not like they said, oh, screw this I'm going to sit on my hands, you know, which is, I think, very American. We forget how hard Americans work. And with what almost good faith Americans keep, stay optimistic that maybe next time it'll work out. And I think we see that in the families as well.
Tom Casciato: And these folks really personify that hard work ethic.
Kathleen Hughes: Yeah.
Tom Casciato: That is that we associate with Wisconsin, that we associate with you all in Michigan, that we associate with Ohio. There's something about them that as Kathy says, they do persevere. They never stop working hard. In all of these 34 years we've been filming with them, there's never been a point where they thought about giving up or they stopped working their tails off.
Patrick Center: Do we learn what policies work and what don't work?
Tom Casciato: I don't think we do from this film. I think what we learn is that Washington has not paid a ton of attention to what we would call the American working class. I'm not the first person to observe how wealthy some people have gotten during this period in the nineties up through the present and that wealth has not come around to all Americans. So, I think that's what is pretty obvious, but we can't give policy prescriptions. We've just seen that there hasn't been enough paying attention to these people.
Patrick Center: The reunion, what was that like to come back?
Tom Casciato: You know, it's so. I guess I would describe it as anti-climax because we're used to them and they're used to us and it was lovely to see each other again. But it was not this amazing moment. It's like, how are you doing? Okay, how are you doing? What's new with you? We've gotten to know them very well over the years. So, it's always a treat to see the Neumann's and the Stanley's and never, I would say, are they too far from our minds. And we've always stayed in touch over the years. One of the most delightful things, if I may say, about the film is that you do meet people when they are young kids, and you do see what they are doing now as adults. And I don't want to give away too much. I'd rather people watch the film. But it's very instructive to see how the kids grow up in these situations, in these difficult economic situations, how they deal with it, how it informs their own choices in life. And the audience can come to its own conclusion about where these kids might end up. And I say kids, some of them are in their 40s.
Kathleen Hughes: And 50s, early 50s. Tom and I always joke, like, how did everybody age and we didn't? And then we take a look in the mirror and we're like, oh my God, we did too.
Tom Casciato: Yeah, it's not a very funny joke.
Patrick Center: You start on a project, you think it's a one-off. Did you ever imagine returning to finish the story? Is it finished or will this continue?
Tom Casciato: It might continue. If history is any indication, it might come around again. There's no immediate plan to do so, but there's never an immediate plan to make the second film, the third film, the fourth film, and now this, the fifth film. So, we don't know. I will say that when Kathy and I were first working on this film, we went to see Michael Apted's film 28 Up, which was part of his 7 Up series, where he went to British school children when they were seven years old and returned every seven years to these same children up into their probably 50s by now, 60s. And we thought, boy, it'd be cool to do something like that.
Kathleen Hughes: But we never planned on it.
Tom Casciato: Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would be able to.
Kathleen Hughes: Yeah. But their stories aren't over yet. I mean, there's a lot more to go. And for the parents, they're looking at retirement right now and if they can retire and what that's going to look like if they do. So, the story's not over.
Patrick Center: FRONTLINE presents Two American families: 1991-2024. The correspondent is Bill Moyers, producers and directors, Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes, thank you so much.
Tom Casciato: Thank you, Patrick, we appreciate it.