If they knew then, what they know now…???
Ravenswood, West Virginia, lives on life support after the Kaiser aluminum plant that powered the towns economic rise slowly dies. Should the other major plant in town close, it could become a modern day ghost town.
Why would the plant close down? Well, it is old and refurbishing it costs. Demand is down in the recession. And the plant is unionized and has high labor costs relative to foreign and some domestic operations.
Kaiser’s Ravenswood plant created a middle class where there was none. When the United Steelworkers Union was voted in after the plant opened in 1957, the hourly wage jumped from $1.78 to $3.25.
This isn’t the first time Ravenwood workers have been out of work for a long time – twenty years ago they were locked out for nineteen months in a union labor dispute with the company.
That should have been a clue that the company, and the market, viewed their plant as “optional”. That should have been their clue to scale back their demands on the company. To work like the dickens to make it a better, more efficient plant. And to broaden their career options
Dave Guthrie, 51, says he’s glad he was laid off because now he has the time, money and motivation to go to college. He wants to be a traveling nurse, working short-term contracts around the country, far from what he calls the plant’s "us-vs.-them" labor-management dynamic.
Will 19 years of “good times” makes up for being jobless now? Will it make up for not leaving a strong town to their kids?
It seems a bad trade to me. I’d be mad at the “leaders” that egged it on.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:08 am
Have you considered the role of organized labor in creating the broad middle class that contributed to America’s prosperity being created and shared by a hugely larger fraction of the population that would have so shared if pre-20th century attitudes of labor as a mere commodity had continued unabated? Do you really think that you and most of the people you know would be in your present comfortable positions if you had been born in 1864?
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:15 am
Not my concern, since I was born 100 years later.
Life is a “today”thing. I’m not going to thank unions now, for some modest improvement, when they are causing problems today. Just like I take no blame for racism/slavery – I wasn’t there.