Solana PyneOctober 24, 2012 06:00

America the Gutted: Ironworker Larry Brown

Larry Brown worked for the fifth-largest bridge builder in America. Then China came to town.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/taxonomy/term/22644/121023/america-the-gutted-ironworker-larry-brown

The American middle class is in distress. Here's what that means to the world's largest economy, and the rest of planet earth.

After losing ground for four decades, middle America increasingly looks doomed. Here's how it happened.

Almost everyone seems to be in it, no one can define it — but the middle class is the central theme of the presidential campaign.

The Tar Heel State has been the hardest hit by factory outsourcing.

The new victims of US outsourcing? Asians who once took Americans' jobs.

Once the bridge-building capital of the West Coast, the Portland area has suffered as major projects go overseas.

Six thousand miles from the coast of the United States, a new group of ironworkers are building bridges and, slowly, their own economic futures.

For law firms looking to scale back, some of America’s cities are looking better even than New Delhi.

Legal work from America is already changing lives in India — and the business is just starting to take off.

Travel from the shuttered factory towns of North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest to the emerging boomtowns of Asia.

Manila worker says stitching Wrangler brand clothes has kept his family alive.

When the road to the middle class is not a straight line.

Jonah M. Kessel

Glenda Bell has struggled to make ends meet since she lost her job at a Wrangler plant nearly ten years ago.

Windsor, in one of North Carolina's poorest counties, hasn't recovered from the loss of its Wrangler factory nearly a decade ago.

After being laid off twice, Dean Stoddard went back to school and earned a degree in computer network administration but he still couldn't find work.

Larry Brown worked for the fifth-largest bridge builder in America. Then China came to town.

Once the West Coast hub for bridge building, the Portland metropolitan area has suffered as major projects moved overseas.

From an island off Shanghai, Wang Pei helped build the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.