Ray

Ray is an illustrative, composite figure rather than a real person, used to show what the pilot state in Project 2029 does for one worker.

Ray inspected welds at the same plant for 19 years and made $51,000 a year doing it, with insurance that came with the job. It had taken him most of a decade to get genuinely good, and being good mostly meant knowing which welds to look at twice.

The cameras went up in March. Nobody explained them, and nobody needed to, because what they were doing was obvious. They watched him work. Every weld he passed and every weld he sent back was an answer, and by the summer a piece of software costing less per month than his health insurance could tell the difference about as well as he could. He had spent five months training his own replacement without being told he was doing it. In August the whole department went, both shifts, 22 people.

He was fifty-three. The marketplace health plan he found cost $410 a month and carried a $7,000 deductible, which meant that he was insured on paper and uninsured in any way that mattered. He sent out 41 job applications. The jobs that would have taken him paid 12 dollars an hour, which did not feel like it covered keeping a car on the road to get to them. The jobs that paid had 400 applicants. After a few months he stopped looking, which meant the unemployment statistics stopped counting him.

He watched the inauguration because it was on. There were four minutes in it he was not expecting. The president said that the country had spent 40 years telling towns like Ray's that the work was gone and nothing could be done about it, that this was untrue, and that there was more work in front of the country than there were people to do it. Then came the part that made him sit up. What the country needed, the president said, was a mobilization on the scale of the last world war. It had a name, the Mission for America, it would take an act of Congress to build in full, and the next two years would be spent proving in public that it could be done.

And then the president said the country was not going to sit and wait for that. Between the lending the federal government already runs and the programs the states already have, there was enough to start anywhere that wanted to start. So the ask went to governors rather than to Congress. Every state was invited to compete, and the state that won would be the demonstration site for the entire Mission for America. It would put people to work insulating and re-equipping its public housing, its schools, its hospitals, and its municipal buildings, and it would build out the childcare that let those people take the jobs.

The conversations with governors had in fact started during the transition, weeks before the address, so that somebody could say yes quickly. Days later Ray's governor announced the state was going for it. Ray himself found out from a push alert. The terms had been published on inauguration day, the state won in the early spring, and with the win came federal demonstration money and the federal staff who arrived alongside it.

At first, Ray was not impressed. He had seen too many local programs retrain people for jobs that never came. What this one trained people for was the retrofit work itself, meaning insulating, sealing, and re-equipping buildings so they stop wasting heat, on the state's public housing, schools, and hospitals. He applied anyway and got accepted. It paid from the first week, less than the plant had but more than anything else on offer, and the insurance started with it. The community college was not ready, so the first six weeks were video, a login, a schedule, a field for his bank details, and a test every Friday. Two men from his old shift failed out. Then the college opened and he did the hands-on portion in person and came out certified as a lead renovator and a weatherization installer.

The crew was nine people he would never have assembled himself, including a woman who had hung drywall since she was seventeen and knew more than the rest of them together, and a laid-off bank software engineer. Two journey-level insulators with 30 years between them ran the crew and taught it. Their first job was a public housing estate put up in 1948, 61 units in four buildings.

They finished, and 61 apartments were warm. Then the crew moved on to a federal building downtown, and then to two more, and then to a hospital system that had signed one of the energy contracts, where the work was bigger and ran longer. Ray leads a crew now, on the full rate for his classification, with coverage that costs him nothing when he uses it.

The midterms are five months out. Ray had never given a dollar or an hour to a campaign in his life. He does both now, and so do his wife, his brother-in-law, and most of what is left of his old shift. They are campaigning across their community for the full Mission for America, on the grounds that what happened to Ray should be available to everybody.