With His Job Gone, an Autoworker Wonders, ‘What Am I as a Man?’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Cheering the deal might check a political box for the president, but getting hired by the buyer would probably mean making $11 an hour, he said, a wage he last made in his early 20s. “It would be back to square one after 25 years in the plant,” he said.
Rick seems to be following the same line of thinking. The notion of working in a different industry just doesn't seem to be considered.
This is probably one of the best times in recent history to start looking for a job. Unemployment is at record lows, and growth is fairly strong. I think the biggest issue here isn't layoffs, it's people putting their sense of identity into their job instead of viewing it as a transaction. 80% of employees at the beginning of the 20th century worked in industries that are either non-existent or drastically smaller by the end of the 20th century. I see no reason why we should expect the 21st century to be any different. Rick's assumption that he would work in the same industry as his father for the entirety of his life seems to be the biggest culprit here, not NAFTA.
Another big elephant in the room is location. It looks like he still lives in Lordstown Ohio. Employment prospects will be drastically better if he moves. It's harder to move with families but not impossible. I moved 3 times (each of them across national borders, no less) when I was a kid and while its hard to settle down in a new place it expanded my worldview and likely made a better person in the long run. The sort of static mentality I talk about earlier also applies to moving. People put their self-worth in their location and hamper their employment opportunities by refusing to move.
The subtext of one of the images reads: "Mr. Marsh with his wife, Lindsay, and their daughter, Abigail. The Marshes have spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio. Moving would be wrenching." It doesn't actually say that their daughter's cerebral palsy is preventing them from moving. I doubt it would be harder to get services in an economically vibrant location with more tax funds for services, as compared to Lordstown Ohio. The fact that they "spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio" seems to drive this home.
Overall I would be much more sympathetic if the author spent their words explaining how Rick has tried to find employment in other fields, has tried to find apprenticeships or trade school education, and is willing to move across the country but still can't find a job then I would be drastically more sympathetic. As it stands, the piece can be summed up as, "laid off auto worker who doesn't search for jobs in different fields and isn't willing to move has trouble finding employment and blames NAFTA and Democrats for his situation". It's clear the author wants to paint a sympathetic picture, but it reads like a pardoy.
I can see both sides, Mr. Marsh is caught in the middle.
I've only heard of this for university tuition. If a student starts university in a state school, and their parents move to the state they have to pay out of state tuition for 2 years. States with good programs are usually liberal ones with high taxes. Discriminating on the basis of origin for disability services seems like a good way to piss off liberal voters. If you can find documentation to demonstrate that someone with cerebral palsy would be denied services because they moved there from out of state, I'm all ears, but I find this claim is dubious.
> It isn't unheard of for states to pay to move someone to a different state just so they to get that person out of their system.
This would help him move.
It isn't unheard of for states to involuntarily ship people to other states for that purpose, either.
"After 25 years he's probably been put in a leadership position, or at least a mentorship position to train new hires. This demonstrates good communication and teamwork ability"
This is a nice to have, but will absolutely not help a man 25 years into a career to find an equivalent salary to support his family and maintain his quality of life in a completely different field.
"Someone who worked in an auto plant for 25 years is probably a good candidate to become a construction worker, plumber, escalator repairman, etc."
No, this cannot possibly be the case, because all those listed job requirements sacrifice the body. At the age of 25 years in a career, it wouldn't be possible to be able to start again in any labor intensive work- the body is no longer there.
"It doesn't actually say that their daughter's cerebral palsy is preventing them from moving. I doubt it would be harder to get services in an economically vibrant location with more tax funds for services, as compared to Lordstown Ohio. The fact that they "spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio" seems to drive this home."
Moving actually causes one to lose residency status, which means a lot of necessary social benefits are no longer available (in order to prevent people from simply moving somewhere with better state benefits). An example that people would be most familiar with would be in state vs out of state tuition. If another state had better benefits, there would be little to say that they would be able to have access fo them. If anything, Mr & Ms March would probably have to wait several years before they have to begin the several years long fight again to secure benefits for their daughter.
"Overall I would be much more sympathetic if the author spent their words explaining how Rick has tried to find employment in other fields, has tried to find apprenticeships or trade school education, and is willing to move across the country but still can't find a job"
It would be more accurate to say that a man who put 25 years into a career no longer has access to this career, has a wife and a dependent daughter, who may be trapped due to fighting a system that holds tons of bureaucracy to avoid fraud, who can no longer sacrifice his body, and is completely out of options in maintaining his quality of life, which he had built up carefully over 25 years.
People can talk about what others can or should have done, but eventually it’s going to be better and easier for them to burn this system down than try to work within it. Trump was a warning shot. What comes next after he fails to accomplish anything is going to be worse.
These skills are useful in any field. Equivalent salary may be optimistic, but it's still drastically better than zero slary.
> No, this cannot possibly be the case, because all those listed job requirements sacrifice the body. At the age of 25 years in a career, it wouldn't be possible to be able to start again in any labor intensive work- the body is no longer there.
The man is at least decently well built: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/28/us/28lordstown-A1...
What you're writing is also contradicted by the article. His job at the automobile plant was also physically demanding, "The truth was, he never really liked the work. He found it boring and physically demanding. He worked in the paint shop, wearing two sets of gloves, big plastic boots and a full body apron, while he wielded a sanding tool that smoothed the primer on the surface of the cars. Every night he came home drenched and exhausted."
> Moving actually causes one to lose residency status, which means a lot of necessary social benefits are no longer available (in order to prevent people from simply moving somewhere with better state benefits). An example that people would be most familiar with would be in state vs out of state tuition. If another state had better benefits, there would be little to say that they would be able to have access fo [sic] them. If anything, Mr & Ms March would probably have to wait several years before they have to begin the several years long fight again to secure benefits for their daughter.
Tuition is an exception, as it's a very high cost (often tens of thousands of taxpayer subsidy) over the course of four years. Another commenter made the same point, but did not provide evidence for this to be true when asked. If you can find identify documentation on such policies that explain that states discriminate on the basis of residency for disability services, by all means provide it. But until then, I am not inclined to trust these unsubstantiated claims.
Even if this were true, this represents a couple years of overhead cost that could still pay off in the long run. Even at minimum wage, employment would bring in probably $10k a year at least. This could offset loss of services for two years.
> It would be more accurate to say that a man who put 25 years into a career no longer has access to this career, has a wife and a dependent daughter, who may be trapped due to fighting a system that holds tons of bureaucracy to avoid fraud, who can no longer sacrifice his body, and is completely out of options in maintaining his quality of life, which he had built up carefully over 25 years.
This is contradicted by the article. You say that he is physically not capable of demanding work, but the job that he lost (and would have continued working in) was physically demanding. You say that he is out of options, when he does not seem to be considering the options of moving or working in a different field. The article explains that these other opportunities do exist, "Hundreds of workers have already transferred. His nephew packed up his family and moved to Flint. The alternative, working on natural gas wells in Pennsylvania, paid him $13 an hour, about half what he was making at G.M." $13/hr is close to twice Pennsylvania's minimum wage. It's not a terrible job, and it'd at least put some money in the bank and diversify his skills.
At best, you're taking an overly pessimistic view of the situation. At worst, you're tying to rationalize the thinking that if the current opportunities aren't as good as the ones that existed in the past it's better just stay unemployed.
This is overly optimistic. He is losing half his salary, with a wife and a daughter to feed. He will lose his quality of life. That's a huge deal, and is worth pointing out and have sympathy for.
Also, if you still need evidence:
1. https://www.performcarenj.org/pdf/families/dd-residency-fact... This is proof of residency for NJ to have a NJ specific residency. 2. https://www.dshs.wa.gov/esa/eligibility-z-manual-ea-z/reside... This is proof of residency for DC to have food benefits. 3. https://www.dhs.state.mn.us/main/idcplg?IdcService=GET_DYNAM... Minnesota requires 30 days explicitly.
This is false, or at least a misrepresentation of the situation. He has already lost his salary. And now he is unwilling to work in a job that pays half of his previous salary. He is strictly better off financially with the $13/hr job than he is now, and he will have a job to give himself a sense of purpose (which seems to be his biggest issue) on top of that. I still do not see any barrier preventing him from taking such an opportunity.
> 1. https://www.performcarenj.org/pdf/families/dd-residency-fact.... This is proof of residency for NJ to have a NJ specific residency.
But crucially this does not require any duration of residency. Literally all that's necessary is a NJ diver's license. He doesn't need to live for years in NJ to get benefits, he just needs to stand in line at the DMV after moving there.
> https://www.dshs.wa.gov/esa/eligibility-z-manual-ea-z/reside...
From this page:
An individual determine is a resident if he/she meets the following conditions:
* Is living in Washington; and
* Is not receiving comparable assistance form another state or tribe;
* Intends to remain in the state permanently or indefinitely; or
* Entered the state looking for a job or a job commitment.
If he moves to Washington State for a job, then he becomes a resident and is eligible for benefits.
> https://www.dhs.state.mn.us/main/idcplg?IdcService=GET_DYNAM.... Minnesota requires 30 days explicitly.
30 days is hardly prohibitive.
You have still failed to provide evidence to back up the claim that his daughter's condition is preventing him from moving due to loss of benefits (at least, not for any loss of benefits longer than 30 days). In fact, your sources show that if he moves to another state for a job then he will be able to get benefits either immediately or within a month. If anything you're disproving the claim that loss of benefits are preventing him from moving.
Also, I say that this position being made is again failing to consider that 13$/hr may not be adequate. It is not strictly better- one has to pay the cost of moving, then spiral into debt assuming 13$/hr isn't enough to cover the medical expenses and living requirements of one's family. Assuming he's an intelligent man, he will likely already have examined the economics and found it doesn't check out.
I think this position is really unsympathetic and assuming an incompetence that isnt there and is overly gatekeeping. Someone is in a situation in which there are no good options due to little fault of his own, and that sucks. That's all the article is saying.
> Also, I say that this position being made is again failing to consider that 13$/hr may not be adequate. It is not strictly better- one has to pay the cost of moving, then spiral into debt assuming 13$/hr isn't enough to cover the medical expenses and living requirements of one's family. Assuming he's an intelligent man, he will likely already have examined the economics and found it doesn't check out.
How is he somehow going to spiral into debt with a $13/hr job, but not spiral into debt with no job? This makes no sense. You're trying to say that by making more money he is going to go into debt.
> I think this position is really unsympathetic and assuming an incompetence that isnt there and is overly gatekeeping. Someone is in a situation in which there are no good options due to little fault of his own, and that sucks. That's all the article is saying.
I don't think he is incompetent, that's my whole point. He has opportunities, he is competent, but he feels like he is incompetent because there's something holding him back from taking these opportunities. And in the end, this lack of employment is eating away at his sense of self work. This man seems to have it ingrained into his identity that he is an auto plant worker in Ohio, and he will never be able to be anything but an auto plant worker in Ohio. He is aware of opportunities elsewhere. The article explains that hundreds of other plant workers have done this, "Hundreds of workers have already transferred. His nephew packed up his family and moved to Flint". I don't necessarily blame him for his refusal to accept the available job opportunities. I blame the society and culture he grew up in that hammered it into his head that he'll never be anything but an auto plant worker. Feeling sympathy for whatever it was that leads him to make his decisions doesn't mean we need to to try and justify these decisions.
"For every job, so many men, so many men noone needs." Written in the Thatcher days, inspired by the Depression, still relevant today.
These are complicated issues, which are not solved by soundbites on TV or vague, unrealistic promises to keep the status quo in eternity. I agree that some kind of job mobility is required in the long run; the real question is how much of it is needed. I hope the answer is not "a lot", especially among those who have or earn less.
> Hundreds of workers have already transferred. His nephew packed up his family and moved to Flint. The alternative, working on natural gas wells in Pennsylvania, paid him $13 an hour, about half what he was making at G.M.
> You might suggest that people just move, but what if they have a mortgage on a house that's suddenly worthless?
Then he should blame his situation on his own gamble on real-estate speculation, and not NAFTA.
> And that's not even factoring in the "soft" costs of losing your community and possibly moving away from family.
My whole point is, the emphasis on these "soft" factors are what's holding him back. When you move, you don't "lose" community, you swap them out for a different one. Moving away from family may be challenging, but it's probably worse to not have a job.
> Given the U.S.'s aversion to social welfare, people end up stuck without any options.
I don't think lack of welfare is an issue here:
> G.M. is a lifeline for Mr. Marsh, too. It will pay him a pension, a rare thing in today’s economy. He may have given up raises, but he gets a share of the company’s profits — last year, about $10,000. Under the union contract, he gets payments to supplement his unemployment check, and his family still has health insurance
Ohio unemployment benefits pay half of weekly wages up to $424. Rick would be receiving $424 if $26 per hour was his wages while he was employed. So he's getting $22,000 per year in unemployment plus $10,000 from his GM pension on top of that. Is getting $32,000 per year in pension and unemployment benefits considered bad welfare? He's getting about 2/3 of his income while he was employed in unemployment benefits. Probably more if you take taxes into account. And health insurance. And the "payments to supplement his unemployment check" that the article doesn't explain in detail.
There's a good chance that abundant welfare is why he isn't looking for work. If he took the $13 and hour job in Pennsylvania he may lose more in benefits than he'd be gaining in wages. I wouldn't blame him if this were the case, but the fact that our welfare system is actively discouraging people from seeking employment is the messed up part of this situation. Not the fact that manufacturing jobs are moving because of globalization.
The article calls out another reason. His daughter has celebral palsy I think, and they helped bring things into town for her.
> Then, when Rick Marsh got the biggest test of his life — the birth of his beloved daughter, Abigail, and her diagnosis of cerebral palsy at the age of one — his job became a central part of how he saw himself. He was her provider, her protector. That was his worth in the world.
> Or he could transfer to another G.M. plant sooner, but he hates that idea. His biggest worry is for his daughter, Abby, now 14. He and his wife have spent years fighting to get her services in Ohio, aides in school and coverage under Medicaid. Moving would be wrenching.
Nowhere does it state that aides in school or overage under Medicaid would be lost if he moved. If anything I suspect that services would be better in an economically healthy town that has a better tax base.
Not everything is SV property greed. What if this person bought the home so he could just have a place to live? Not everybody buys a home with the intention of making money. Some just want a stable home for their kids.
> My whole point is, the emphasis on these "soft" factors are what's holding him back. When you move, you don't "lose" community, you swap them out for a different one. Moving away from family may be challenging, but it's probably worse to not have a job.
In general your family is always better than a job. When you are on your death bed I can guarantee you that your boss won't be there holding your hand.
> I wouldn't blame him if this were the case, but the fact that our welfare system is actively discouraging people from seeking employment is the messed up part of this situation.
Then how do you explain our current low unemployment numbers? If anything it appears working is preferred over our welfare system. Many people want purpose and want to work.
If you're buying a home on credit, then you're speculating on real estate. Whether or not your intent is to turn a profit is besides the point. If someone wants a home, then can rent or buy a home that they can afford with cash. You don't need to buy a house on credit to find a home.
> In general your family is always better than a job. When you are on your death bed I can guarantee you that your boss won't be there holding your hand.
If you don't have a job then it's hard to provide a good life for your family. You won't have anyone holding your hand on your deathbed if you can't provide for you family and your wife and kids have to leave you to find a man that can. The strain of having to move away from cousins, aunts, etc. is drastically less than not having a job - at least in my view of things. The example in the article isn't even moving very far - literally the neighboring state. Rick and his family could easily see their extended family on the holidays if they wanted to.
> Then how do you explain our current low unemployment numbers? If anything it appears working is preferred over our welfare system. Many people want purpose and want to work.
Unemployment tracks people who are looking for work but cannot find a job. If people stop looking for work, then they are no longer counted as unemployed. This is consistent with the fact that we're seeing low unemployment but also lower labor participation rates. Granted, lower labor participation is at least in part due to other factors like an ageing population.
In the postwar period, American manufacturing had far less competition than it does now. Most other industrialized countries were recovering from the war, foreign cars did not fit American consumer preferences, and China was locked into a decades-long cycle of self-destruction. Automation technology wasn't very good, so there were tons of factory jobs. All of that has now changed.
This man's job, and the other jobs like it, only existed because of historical circumstances that cannot be replicated. Politicians might be able to save some manufacturing jobs, but we will never have nearly as many as we did before.
I feel sorry for this man, because jobs like his aren't coming back, and because he is being lied to by politicians who say those jobs can be saved.
It's possible that what we are now seeing is the end of a historical and economic anomaly: a mass middle class. Our politics is not handling it well.
Replace historical with political. Distribution is always political. You want a strong middle class raise top marginal tax rates back up to 70%
History has shown time and again that capitalism left to its own devices does not create a middle-class. As long as Americans keep waiting for it to do so, the middle-class will keep shrinking. Until we get a new New Deal, this trend will not change.
Ironically, many of the people voting for deregulation and small-government are the ones being hurt the most by those things.
Debatable if we factor in the cost of living in many places.
Left behind by the global economy, no, there's no evidence of that. It's a New York Times trope designed to make liberal readers feel superior. Polls showed quite clearly that Brexit was motivated by (a) immigration levels and (b) sovereignty, but these are hard to separate because if the UK was self-ruling and the political elite were more in touch with the population, immigration levels would have been kept lower a long time ago and the issue would never have become as neuralgic. People who are angry over ultra-high immigration levels are both annoyed at the quantity but also annoyed at being ignored and told to shut up about it by out of touch politicians.
In particular, there isn't much discussion of trade war in the UK, nor the rest of Europe.
I couldn't find any good data in my 5 minutes of googling, but I would also expect a good part of CPI/PCE inflation numbers to be about housing costs, and it's pretty clear that housing costs are largely driven by bad regulation, chief among the issues being restrictive zoning laws, but helped along by all sorts of others like CEQA or NY's Scaffold Law etc.
Besides all the larger questions of politics and automation, it really awesome to be part of a team that builds 1000 vehicles a day. Seeing them roll off the end of the line never stops being cool. In IT, your project may last for months and you only see small changes happen slowly over time. In the plant you see parts come together into a complete vehicle over the course of a day.
In IT, if a site or service is down, you know it's a problem, but in manufacturing if the line stops you can see hundreds of people just sitting there.
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People talk about automation like it's new. Automakers have been automating from the very beginning. Designing and building cars is a big job. Designing and building the machine that builds the cars is also a big job. The machine that builds the cars is made of suppliers, trucks, railroads, robots, conveyors, information systems, and yes, people.
Line workers look like people to you and me, and they certainly are people; but to the machine that builds cars they look like extremely capable but slightly inconsistent robots.
What people really don't get is that hyper-automation, when you barely need workers at all, isn't going to come from the West. As we soon don't have anything to automate anymore. Most people here, including most engineers, are in the service sector.
Until recently outsourcing was the cheaper of those two options. That leads people to blame outsourcing for job losses. However, if automation had been cheaper at the time, it would have been more prevalent and probably would have taken the blame instead of outsourcing.
At some point automation will be cheaper than manufacturing in Asia, and then Asian factory jobs will disappear as the American jobs have.
Show some empathy for a man who lost the best thing he ever had. He isn't asking for the world, actually in the article he didn't ask for anything. He was content to make $25 an hour forever and spend it on his family's health and happiness. That's a reasonable thing to want from life in America. Nit picking the particulars of his case isn't useful.
If you say "just move" or "get a new job" or "shoulda seen it coming" consider what you'd feel like if you lost your job of 2+ decades and that job had not helped you develop other marketable skills.
Not every person can have a high-skilled and transferable job like a software engineer.
It’s a stupid human invention, not a god.
I feel there is at least a minimum of 15 years of warning signs that the average person on the assembly line is going to get cut eventually and at least 8-9 announced layoffs that did just that. In that article he explicit references watching other plants suffer the same fate he later did. I have no idea how someone in his position would feel their job is secure other than blind faith, especially because the white collar jobs have been cut just as much as the blue collar ones at the auto manufacturers. He also seems to have actual skills (article references working in the paint shop) compared to others that he might not be quantifying accurately and I hope that he's able to figure that out after looking back on his tenure.
The only thing I feel is something I can emphasize with in this article is the part about feeling trapped in the local health care network that makes it not as feasible to do any sort of economic migration at the risk of not being able to recover the critical health services that they would have lost. If this was the primary point of the article I feel it would resonate better.
The profile is very insightful, but depressing, as how can we have anything but a selfish fight of selfish people, is that what democracy devolves to?
These and many other factors have a high element of luck. Absence of any one can prove a tremendous (though not necessarily unsurmountable) handicap.
But, and this is key: dashed expectations, even where born of a lottery, can become huge personal and societal problems. The stages and processes of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptence, are born from a dramatic shear in expectations.[1] (Differences across social groups, as in racism, are a related phenomenon, though different in that it is distenctions among- rather than within-groups but over time, that are involved.) Writ large over society such disapointments can be exceedingly potent forces, particularly politically.
Discover your own lottery card(s) overpromised and underdelivered, you'll likely feel similarly.
The exectations set up through cultural mythos can prove to have a tremendous downside debt of ther own; "rugged individualsm", "self-sufficiency", "meritocracy", "American dream", "technological progress", "free markets", "manifest destiny", "self-made (wo)man", etc. All of these have fascinating, if not widely known, ideological foundations. And historical literature on each often shown sharp, if buried, contemporary criticism.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Kübler-Ross's initial research is notable. The precipitating event wasn't loss of a loved one, but notification of the subject's own imminent mortality. A dramatic shift in worldview.
"The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it." - Carlin
The guy profiled has one child, who is disabled. The article describes his house as a "big house in the woods", but looking at the picture of their kitchen it is clearly not very "huge" and very far from the kitchens you'd see on HGTV. And the fixtures are 10+ years old.
I think heart-stirring profiles of people as examples of political and social issues are usually not good journalism, but maybe a benefit is that people could humanize whoever the boogeyman of the day is. This guy deserves some flak for putting his whole identity into his job and for believing too much in various political dei ex machina that promised to let him keep it, but "selfish" and "wrecking institutions"?
I might even think the reliance on politicians, or belief in their obvious lies about such situations as decidedly childish.
I don’t agree with it at all, mostly because too often a job looks like a toxic relationship more than anything else, meaning you as an employee are expected to be fully emotionally invested in your work, while at the same time your company can fire you in the blink of an eye and not think twice about it.
Anecdotally, the young people I know treat employment as a transaction and recognize the lip-service to all the talk about how the company is like a family for what it is: lip-service. I associate this kind of emotional investment in employment with older workers, especially ones in union jobs where employment forms one's social and political community.
The person who's quoted in the article isn't expounding on philosophy. He's just repeating a common phrase when someone loses the income to feed his family.
The full quote is the last sentence of the article:
>“Without the ability to feed my family and pay for my children and feed my children, what am I as a man?”
He wasn't defining himself in terms of his job. I think we can presume he'd feel fine if he wins the lottery and quits his job because at that point, he's still be able to feed his family without any job.
https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...
If you want to be respected (as a “man” or whatever), you’ve got to earn it, and sometimes your ability to do so is a team effort.
The flip side of this story is the intense grind and self-sacrifice in places like Nagoya, Japan, where auto workers have something to be proud of, but are always aware of how tenuous their future is.
That's one heck of a bait-and-switch. The concept of "whence is my inherent worth or intrinsic value" is way more interesting than "how does automation affect my politics."
Obviously, if you have sick family or other challenges I get it. I’m assuming able bodied and normal ties to places and things.
You're the unusual case here: the vast majority of folks in the US end up living within a stone's throw of wherever they were born. And you'd be crazy to deny that there are many legitimate reasons to do so: Deep local social networks and family ties? Long-term investments in housing or other local property? Rearing children in a stable environment? Niche subject-matter experience and expertise in a trade that isn't necessarily as portable as digital skills are? Belonging to a particular local subculture that doesn't necessarily exist elsewhere?