When There's No Ford in Your Future: "I know. My family was a part of the last major Ford layoff drama 25 years ago. In 1980 Ford announced the closure of several plants, including the aluminum engine plant in Sheffield, Ala., where my family was living. We were a Ford family, transferring every few years from plant to plant, from Michigan to California to Pennsylvania and, finally, to Sheffield. For years, life was good, with two cars, a nice house, even a membership at the modest local country club.
The layoff announcement threw our family, and the families of 1,500 other workers, into turmoil. Families went from planning vacations and seeking college educations to planning cutbacks and seeking low-paying but available work. There was some initial optimism. Lifetime union workers felt freed from the constraints of the factory and planned to start businesses of their own.
One of our family friends started a woodworking business. Another opened a factory outlet for mattresses that his brother manufactured in Memphis. The planning and dreaming helped ease the pain of losing a substantial paycheck. But the realities of a dwindling local economy soon shuttered these modest businesses. Wal-Mart arrived. Downtown withered.
Our own family, with me attending Stanford and my sister at Vanderbilt, took out student loans, applied for scholarships and sought positions that helped pay room and board. I bused tables at one residence and became a resident assistant my senior year, which defrayed my room-and-board cost. There was pressure to transfer back home to the University of Alabama, but I persuaded my parents to let me stay at Stanford if I could pay for my education myself."
1 comment:
before any man, or woman, joins a blue collar union, he should be compelled to watch a show which is on pbs quite often. the title, i think, is bethlehem steel. once a giant in the world of steel making, they were forced to close down by union demands. the workers, or their union leaders, kept getting more and more in the way of benefits, and doing less and less work. little by little they were sucking the life blood out of bethlehem steel. they woke up one morning and all the work was going to foreign companies and their own was closing down. now they had time to read a book by ayn rand, titled, ATLAS SHRUGGED. i read that book when i was 24 years old and it has been my bible ever since.
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