The BorgWarner plant sits empty between Muncie and Yorktown on Kilgore Avenue, a former symbol of greater economic and industrial times. The million-square-foot factory once housed up to 6,000 employees, making parts for World War II Jeeps, Corvettes and Ford F-150s, to name a few. It closed in April, eliminating 780 jobs and ending more than 100 years of union industry in Muncie.
"Over the course of the 20th century it was enormously important," James Connolly, director of the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University, said.
Warner Gear, as it was originally called, was founded in 1901 by brothers Tom and Henry Warner, working out of their garage. After a merger in the '20s, the company became BorgWarner, and expanded to three plants. The company's union, United Auto Workers Local 287, organized in 1937. Years later it became the largest employer in the city, making differential gears, transmissions and transfer cases. Connolly also called the company a powerful force, not only in terms of employing people, but as an institution in the community.
Though Connolly said the plant's jobs had been dropping gradually for 30 years, the real woes started in the late '90s with layoffs resulting from the sale of manual transmission lines to a company in Mexico. In 2005, the company was stripped of its $150,000 tax abatement by the Muncie City Council after failing to create new jobs, as it had promised.
The announcement of closing came in 2007 after union members refused to reopen contract negotiations.
With the help of the Center for Middletown Studies, the Institute for Digital Entertainment and Education has been filming a documentary on the closing for eight months. Connolly said the focus of the film is to explain the significance of the closing for the community and workers, as well as the Midwest and United States. Ball State students involved with the film are archiving the plant's past and talking with former workers to show the importance of the company in Muncie. He added that the story isn't unique to Muncie. With jobs being lost across the region, the documentary will relate to more than just BorgWarner employees. Justin Jones, writer and director of the project, said the city may never fully recover from this de-industrialization.
"You can now say Muncie is a non-union town," he said, and added, "Ball State is now the largest employer in Delaware County,"
Other companies like Indiana Steel & Wire, Delco Battery and Chevrolet-Muncie closed their doors toward the end of the century, leaving BorgWarner as the only union tie. Connolly mentioned Muncie still has factories, but they aren't as big or unionized.
"The biggest significance of the closing," he said, "was kind of symbolic. It was like the final nail in the coffin of Muncie as a city that had large-scale manufacturing with union workers."
It's unclear what the long-term effects of the closing could be for the city. Despite new jobs coming to Delaware County from Brevini Wind, a wind turbine manufacturer, the scale of BorgWarner's employment base is untouched.
Jones also said the Ball family was a primary investor for Warner Gear.
"At the end of this story for Muncie," he said, "the only thing left is the things the Balls endowed to the city."
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