* Background is here if you need it. In These Times reporter Sarah Lazare spoke with people dependent on Belivdere’s Stellantis plant reopening…

While they are at the center of a brewing nationwide fight, Belvidere workers face limbo in their personal lives. Simms, who is 47, has been at the plant since 1999 and is just five years from retirement. But while out of work she’s unable to accumulate credits for her pension, and if she were to retire before her 30-year mark, this benefit would be significantly reduced. So she is forced to wait until there is a job to work. She went into this industry, she says, expecting to do ​“30 and out.”

This built-in limit is important, she explains, because assembly line work is hard on your body. Most recently, she worked in the chassis department, where she put the big parts of the vehicle model together. ​“When you’re in a factory building a car every 48 seconds, it takes a toll on your knees, shoulders, everything,” she says. ​“Some of the guns torque really hard, that’s stress on shoulders, elbows. You’re on your feet most of the day.”

Simms is one of 815 laid-off members of the local receiving health coverage (but not dental) and Supplemental Unemployment Benefit (SUB) pay, which supplements her unemployment benefits so that she’s bringing in roughly 74% of her previous salary at 40 hours a week, not accounting for lost overtime pay, cost of living adjustments or raises. (Under the contract, workers who receive this are technically coded to ​“temporarily” laid off.) This benefit, secured in the contract, is helpful, she says, but her current job instability — and that of her ex-husband, also a laid-off Stellantis worker — has already impacted their family.

Before the plant idled, her daughter had been looking at colleges as far away as Texas. But instead she decided to go to a community college in nearby Freeport so that she could ​“take care of” her younger brother, then a sophomore in high school, in the event their parents had to transfer to a different plant. […]

For some, the devastation was immediate — and extreme. Kristin Smith is the director of the B1 Food Pantry in Belvidere, which distributes food every Thursday from a local church. When I met her at the pantry, she explained that her own son worked for a Stellantis supplier before he lost his job, though he has since found new work.

She says that when the plant closed, new faces arrived at the food pantry from the auto industry. The need level is high. When I showed up at 2:30 p.m., they had just run out of food for the day. ​“Today, we served 526 families, but we could have served 200 more,” Smith says. ​“The need is bigger than ever.”