No Country for Middle-Aged Men (Mother Jones)

[kpete]

No Country for Middle-Aged Men
Tom Hazel worked for three decades in a blazing hellhole to get his pension. But the financial geniuses who took over his plant had other ideas.
—By Sasha Abramsky


—Photo: Leah Nash
May/June 2009

TOM HAZEL had six months to go. He'd been at his job at the aluminum plant in Longview, Washington, for 29 years and six months. Under his union contract, he was eligible to retire with a full pension—about $1,000 a month, or $37.50 for each year of employment—when he hit his 30th anniversary.

It was a promise that had kept him going for decades in a job that otherwise had little to recommend itself. Temperatures in the foundry soared well past 100 degrees; workers were required to wear respirator masks, into which they tore holes to smoke cigarettes as they lugged massive iron studs and jackhammers. Once, a guy was effectively cut in half when a piece of machinery fell on him; other men were electrocuted, or burned to death by molten metal. Aluminum workers are also at elevated risk of leukemia and a host of lung diseases. "I don't know how many times I thought about quitting," one of Hazel's colleagues admits. "But I thought, 'Boy, I've got too many years invested here. I can't afford to give up those years.'"

The attitude was common: Aluminum offered men with no college a ticket into the middle class, into one of the cozy wooden houses lining the town's side streets, and eventually into a comfortable retirement. Young men were brought into the factory by fathers, uncles, brothers. "They used to call it the mill flunkies. You'd hire in, show up every day, do the job you're supposed to do, and you thought you were going to be taken care of," recalls Hazel's union president, Bill Hannah, who joined the company at age 19. Less than an hour's drive north of Portland, the town of 35,000, originally designed by the Long-Bell Lumber Company as part of the World War I-era City Beautiful movement, retained a close-knit working-class culture; even the restaurants were unionized well into the 1980s.

..............................

Today, the foundry sits shuttered. Tom Hazel's pension plan has been suspended, and the lifetime medical benefits he was promised are gone. Any dreams of crabbing are now just that. He's emptied his savings to support his wife, son, grandson, and two stepchildren; his new job, as a forklift driver at the local timber plant, has very limited benefits, and he counts himself lucky to have it. He'll get a pension eventually, at 62, but right now, with seven years to go, that's not much help.

more at:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/no-country-middle-aged-men

[lib2DaBone]

1. American workers should bring this thing to a boil..

what have we got to lose? Are they going to lay-us-off?

Man, this pisses me off. 30 years of abuse under Reaganomics... productivity up.. wages down.

[truedelphi]

2. But hey, things have gotta improve, right?

President Obama is promising job retraining. Good to know that my friends who are laid off while in their fifties after amassing not one but two bachelors, plus a master's degree, in social work or psychology, will now get some training!! Same goes for people I know who have been in the sciences -when their jobs shipped to Singapoore, they were left jobless, while those with HB1 Visas were considered more hireable.


Of course, because my friends are of an age wherein anyone who hires them might have to start paying more in terms of health insurance premiums, and that is something most employers will not do, then what the Presdient should be doing is everything he can to bring about Universal Single Payer Health Care. Doesn't seem like the people around him have mentioned its existence though.

[bemildred]

3. This is why Capitalism sucks. nt

[stevedeshazer]

4. Longview is a shell of what it used to be.

It's really a tough place to be.