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“We Can’t Reach Him”: Joe Manchin Is Ghosting the West Virginia Union Workers Whose Jobs His Daughter Helped Outsource
On July 31, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical-manufacturing plants is scheduled to shut its doors.
Set on 22 acres in Morgantown, West Virginia, the plant, built in 1965 by the once-storied American generic-drug company Mylan Laboratories, has made 61 drug products, including a substantial portion of the world’s supply of levothyroxine, a critical thyroid medicine. Its 1,431 highly trained workers—analytical chemists, industrial engineers, and senior janitors among them—are represented by the steelworkers union. All are slated to be laid off by month’s end.
The Biden administration has a stated goal of increasing domestic production of pharmaceuticals, and the Morgantown plant is one of a dwindling number of facilities on home soil that produce vital and affordable medicine for the U.S. market. The plant has also lifted hundreds of West Virginia families into the middle class, with the children of its employees going on to become doctors and lawyers.
Under Mylan’s cofounder Mike Puskar, employees received free health care and medicine, turkeys on Thanksgiving, Christmas bonuses, and generous wages. “My father walked the plant once a week,” Puskar’s daughter, Johanna, told Vanity Fair. “He knew everyone’s names. He knew their children’s names. He knew their parents’ names.” Puskar died in 2011, nine years after he placed a businessman named Robert J. Coury at the company’s helm.
The new corporate entity, Viatris Inc., was formed in November 2020 when Mylan merged with the Pfizer subsidiary Upjohn. A month later it announced plans to close the Morgantown plant and told the staff it would move most manufacturing to India, and some to Australia, according to a plant employee.
This would seem to be the perfect fight for West Virginia’s senior U.S. senator, Joe Manchin III, a voluble champion of high-paying union jobs for the Mountain State’s workers. But when officials with the United Steelworkers Local 8-957 managed to get roughly two minutes of his time, over a video call he took from the U.S. Senate floor, there was no fight at all. “Sorry about your luck,” he told them, according to a union official and confirmed by five others who participated in the March 10 call. “It sounds like they’ve reached a corporate decision. There is very little I can do.”
A spokesperson for Senator Manchin vehemently denied this account of the call. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Manchin said, “For months, I have engaged in conversations with Viatris, Monongalia County, the Morgantown Area Partnership, and local and state leaders to find a solution that protects every single job.”
But union officials say they never heard anything from Manchin after their brief call. “We can’t reach him,” Joseph Gouzd, president of the local steelworkers union, told me. “He won’t respond. His aides won’t respond.” Their repeated phone calls and requests for a meeting have gone unanswered.
Union officials believe that Manchin’s silence can be traced to the fact that his daughter Heather Bresch, the former CEO of Mylan, walked away with a $30.8 million golden parachute from the Mylan-Upjohn merger. The resulting entity, which so swiftly targeted the Morgantown plant for closure, is led by Bresch’s former Mylan colleagues, who were also exorbitantly compensated in the merger.
“My father spent his whole life to make that company successful, and it took them less than 10 years to destroy it,” Johanna Puskar said as she contemplated the impending closure. “They came and they robbed it blind till there was nothing left.”
In a lengthy statement to Vanity Fair, in response to detailed questions, Viatris said it was committed to ensuring supply continuity, maintaining the quality of its medicines, and providing generous severance packages for its workers. The decision to close the Morgantown plant “was one we did not take lightly and in no way reflects upon the company’s appreciation for the commitment, work ethic, and valuable contributions of our employees,” it said.
For years Mylan’s flagship plant withstood an industry-wide tsunami of outsourcing.
Even as Western drug companies moved manufacturing capacity offshore, seeking a cheaper labor pool, weaker environmental regulations, and more distance from the Food and Drug Administration’s sharp-eyed inspectors, the Morgantown plant thrived. Because of the plant’s exemplary inspection record, and massive scale of operations, the FDA used it for decades as a training ground for its inspectors.
It also helped that the plant’s workers knew they were making drugs for their neighbors and countrymen. By 2017, 17 billion of the 20 billion doses made annually at the Morgantown plant were dispensed to U.S. consumers. “I use some of the drugs they manufacture within five minutes from my home,” said Danielle Walker, a Democrat in the West Virginia House of Delegates.
But the plant Puskar built was no match for the predatory brand of capitalism embraced by the management troika of Bresch, Coury, and a scientist named Rajiv Malik, who’d spent almost two decades at India’s largest drug company, Ranbaxy, before it collapsed in 2013 amid an immense data-fraud scandal. Together, according to numerous current and former employees, they emphasized global expansion over neighborliness, and speed and cost reductions over quality. They also allegedly escalated hostilities with the union in an effort to freeze wages and increase work shifts, even as their own compensation grew spectacularly.
The Morgantown closure isn’t just a tragedy for its American workforce. It’s also a step backward for U.S. efforts to prepare for the next pandemic. “Did 600,000 people die in vain without us learning we couldn’t get hold of sanitizer and toilet paper?” asked Barbara Evans Fleischauer, a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. “Aren’t medical drugs important? Wouldn’t we want them to be manufactured in our country?”
In fact, we do. America’s urgent need to control the making of its own essential medicines is supposedly a top priority for the Biden administration. Last month the White House issued a report on building resilient supply chains, which noted that 63% of all FDA-registered facilities manufacturing finished doses of generic drugs, and 87% of those making their active ingredients, are located outside of the United States. The report described this dependence on foreign nations as a “key vulnerability” for the U.S. drug supply and called for “increased domestic production capacity” for critical drugs.
Given this confluence of Senator Manchin’s jobs agenda and President Biden’s goal for American pharmaceutical self-sufficiency, it seems possible that the Morgantown plant could be deemed critical infrastructure. In February an antibiotics plant in Bristol, Tennessee—the only U.S.-based facility still making amoxicillin—was rescued from imminent closure after being designated as critical infrastructure under the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
At its height, in 2016, the Morgantown manufacturing site employed more than 3,700 full-time employees and made more than 1,400 drug products, a scale that dwarfs most American drug-manufacturing sites, according to FDA records characterized for Vanity Fair.
But instead of trying to save the plant, Biden officials appear to be tiptoeing around Manchin, who has emerged as a political kingmaker and hostage-taker in a U.S. Senate where Democrats hold a whisker-thin majority. Making the most of his power to swing votes, he has blocked critical aspects of President Biden’s agenda by refusing to support filibuster reform and taken campaign contributions from Republican donors happy to reward his spoiler role.
Hence a strange cone of silence has descended over this looming manufacturing wipeout that will harm the national interest. A U.S. Health and Human Services spokesperson declined to make any officials available for an interview, telling Vanity Fair, “We are aware and tracking this closure that was announced last year—but we cannot speak to internal efforts regarding one company at this time.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
In 1961, Mike Puskar and a fellow Army veteran named Don Panoz launched the drug-distribution business that would become Mylan Laboratories in an abandoned skating rink in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. As the company grew, its operations were guided by Puskar’s oft-stated motto: “Do it right, or don’t do it at all.”
An episode in 1988 helped cement the company’s reputation for integrity. In an attempt to figure out why the FDA was slow-walking approval of its drug applications, Mylan hired a private detective who helped uncover a major corruption scandal. Competing generic-drug companies were bribing FDA reviewers to accelerate approval of their applications, literally dropping envelopes of cash onto their desks. Amid industry reforms, the Morgantown plant became an exemplar.
As recounted in the company-sponsored book Mylan: 50 Years of Unconventional Success, an FDA investigator would perch on a ladder and draw a white-gloved finger across the top of the plant’s manufacturing equipment. Company executives let out a sigh of relief once the gloved finger came up “white as ever.” The FDA’s regulations require all surfaces to be dust-free. Signs that read “WE DO WHAT’S RIGHT, NOT WHAT’S EASY” adorned the hallways of the Morgantown plant.
Quietly, Puskar earned his employees’ gratitude by helping them with medical needs, going so far as to fly at least one of them to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for an organ transplant. At her childhood home, Johanna Puskar recalled seeing a watercolor painting of a mountaineer holding a blonde-haired girl on his shoulders. She later learned that an employee had sent it to thank Puskar for paying out of pocket to get his daughter lifesaving medical treatment.
Facing his own health issues, Puskar stepped down as board chairman in 2009. Coury, who was then CEO, became chairman of the board, and Bresch, Manchin’s daughter, became president. The hallmarks of community-oriented management, such as the Christmas bonuses and Thanksgiving turkeys, would soon vanish. According to one employee, when union members—who had been engaged in collective bargaining—raised the Christmas bonuses with Bresch at a company-wide meeting in the Morgantown plant’s cafeteria in December 2011, she replied, “What do you prefer, a Christmas bonus or a job?” By 2015, her annual compensation had risen more than 600%, to nearly $19 million. Bresch did not respond to a request for comment.
they get what they voted for this is what happens when you put corrupt officials in power with no checks and balances