With His Job Gone, an Autoworker Wonders, ‘What Am I as a Man?’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/auto-worker-jobs-lost.html

70 65 7 years ago

sdegutis3• 7 years ago

Rick Marsh worked in the car plant in Lordstown his entire life. Now that job is gone. What does that mean for his politics?

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."

gnode• 7 years ago

In my mind the two are closely related. There is a political school of thought that people's value is to each other, and that people's needs can be fulfilled by commerce. Automation frustrates this concept by removing our needs to rely on human labour.

sdegutis3• 7 years ago

If people's needs can be fulfilled by commerce then the poor are doomed and always have been. But people who have voluntarily chosen poverty such as Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola have shown that that's simply not true, and that commerce, while a necessary part of life, is not the fulfillment of our needs, nor are politics.

melling• 7 years ago

Automation, offshoring, and foreign competition have been happening for several decades. GM used to produce half the cars in the US. It’s 2019, not 1989!

https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...

nihonde• 7 years ago

Not to mention that they got beat into the dirt on price and quality.

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.

manfredo10• 7 years ago

I think the most important thing here is the difference in outlook. The people in this story lived their lives with the assumption that they will live the same lives as their parents. This hasn't been true since the industrial revolution (>80% of people working in agriculture shrunk to ~2%). This reminds me of British coal-workers striking over layoffs, even though they would receive the same paycheck for life if they were laid off. Their rationale is that they were striking for their children's future jobs in the coal mine. That just struck me as depressing, that parents just assumed that their kids' lot in lives would be a coal miner just like them. Maybe this is the immigrant mentality that people talk about, but

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.

galazzah• 7 years ago

TBH, someone at this age who has spent 25 years in a pipeline probably realizes that, unfortunately, no one in this market wants to hire older folks -- especially with no relevant experience.

manfredo10• 7 years ago

"No relevant experience" is a highly pessimistic outlook. This man has demonstrated an ability to hold down a steady job for decades. That alone puts him ahead of many people that simply lack the ability to hold down a job. Working at an auto plant results in skills with with operating industrial machinery. 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. He may have much better prospects if he expands his skills by learning a trade. Someone who worked in an auto plant for 25 years is probably a good candidate to become a construction worker, plumber, escalator repairman, etc.

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.

the-rc• 7 years ago

Indeed, this is not a new thing.

"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.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

Part of it is an identity thing, part of it is an age thing, but part of it too is a location thing. When plants like this out in the literal middle-of-nowhere close, entire towns die. You might suggest that people just move, but what if they have a mortgage on a house that's suddenly worthless? And that's not even factoring in the "soft" costs of losing your community and possibly moving away from family. Given the U.S.'s aversion to social welfare, people end up stuck without any options.

manfredo10• 7 years ago

Entire towns disappearing is a normal state of affairs.

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.

dfxm12• 7 years ago

Just wondering, how common is it to define yourself as your job? My job is as boring and globally pointless as making cars. I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to claim to have an answer to such a philosophical question of what it means to be a man, but I do know "having the same job in perpetuity" would be relatively low on the list.

I might even think the reliance on politicians, or belief in their obvious lies about such situations as decidedly childish.

temp99990• 7 years ago

Increasingly very common? Without religion and people going unmarried/without kids, your career has become the thing that you pay more attention to.

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.

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

I don't identify with my job, but absolutely with my profession. I'm a developer. Given the extreme level of specialization one needs to reach any heights in a profession, you kind of need to commit and go.

manfredo10• 7 years ago

Without religion and people going unmarried/without kids, your career has become the thing that you pay more attention to.

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.

jasode• 7 years ago

, how common is it to define yourself as your job? [...] philosophical question of what it means to be a man,

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.

dockd• 7 years ago

From my experience, I was much more defined by having a job than I realized. I quit a contracting job. It lead to awkward conversations with people ("What do you do for a living?") and some odd soul searching (what is my place in society?).

bbulkow• 7 years ago

Very interesting article. I see someone who won the lottery. They have built a huge house and family, based on the single skill of showing up for work, and having the right father. While this happens, this person thinks it is thier right, and they will fight politically with every ounce, wrecking whatever institutions and future health of the political system, to keep the privleges they inherited. No sense of altruism or giving back, just keeping what is theirs, justified as there is a child invoked.

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?

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

What lotteries might you have won?

crooked-v• 7 years ago

I feel like you're trying to reach for some sort of 'gotcha' here, but there isn't one. The parent comment's point is that people should be aware of when they've gotten lucky and be able to engage with the world when that luck finally runs out (or, at least, engage with politics that can realistically preserve some of that luck).

threatofrain• 7 years ago

IMO that's what happens when you have democracy but we're not all in the same boat (or maybe this happens to any nation when people aren't in the same boat). We'll always have selfish individuals, but why do we have selfish peoples? That must mean clannism is still a great strategy.

SongOfSeikilos• 7 years ago

I fully believe that you are speaking with best intentions, but I do not understand how you can ask a man to not fight to survive.

hinkley• 7 years ago

He believes he is entitled because he believes he is living the American Dream.

"The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it." - Carlin

iq-thrower1• 7 years ago

Being able to own a house and raise a small family should be something that the majority of people can attain. It shouldn't be like "winning the lottery" but it can seem that way for younger people, including myself.

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"?

erik_landerholm• 7 years ago

I’ve lived in 3 different states and 4 different places for work, in 5 different industries in the last 15 years, while having 4, now 5 kids. It’s not something everyone can do, but it’s not impossible. I have no idea why anyone would care so much to stay in a specific place and work in a specific industry.

Obviously, if you have sick family or other challenges I get it. I’m assuming able bodied and normal ties to places and things.

sithadmin• 7 years ago

I have no idea why anyone would care so much to stay in a specific place and work in a specific industry.

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?

1024core• 7 years ago

We need a jobs retraining program that people like him can avail of. And companies who move jobs overseas must be made to pay for retraining these folks for other jobs. They shouldn't be allowed to just pull up stakes and move out without some repercussions.

merpnderp• 7 years ago

If only these retraining programs ever showed much success. Finding real livelihoods for people who's industries have disappeared is a stubborn intractable problem.

csours2• 7 years ago

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM, and previously worked in a plant. Any opinions are my own.

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.

---

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.

njepa2• 7 years ago

You simply shouldn't believe the talk about automation. Most people don't even know what they are talking about. What do people think Chinese workers do? Mr. Marsh is right, it is about trade. If you can make something where workers are paid peanuts and have little, throughout the entire supply chain, without any penalties why wouldn't you? (except the obvious moral implications and long term effects).

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.

twblalock3• 7 years ago

There are two ways to save money on manufacturing: outsourcing to cheaper foreign workers, or automation.

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.

csours2• 7 years ago

Automation isn't all or nothing. It's a progression. That's what I was trying to say. Automation began with the assembly line, interchangeable (uniform) parts, and specifications.

habosa• 7 years ago

The comments section on this article makes me sad to be a part of the HN community.

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.

toiletfuneral• 7 years ago

It’s so crazy to me how many people on here assume that whatever the market determines must be fundamentally morally correct in all situations. Like the premise is always how come all these poor people chose NOT to be successful?

It’s a stupid human invention, not a god.

xemdetia• 7 years ago

I think the part that makes it hard to emphasize with this case rather than others (someone who became disabled and is unable to work and can't get social services, their work has been not fruitful enough for economic migration, or any of the other regular cases that pop up on HN that do draw out empathy). At what point do you understand the job is no longer secure? I feel like GM particularly has been such a popular dead horse to beat this article seems weird. 2008 financial crisis with the bailouts? The thousands of newspaper articles? When the majority of parts are made by secondary parties instead of GM? The constant layoffs and other plant closures?

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.

twblalock3• 7 years ago

Stories like this demonstrate that our idea of the "middle class" is a postwar anomaly. People ask why the middle class is shrinking, but really we should be asking why such a large middle class ever existed. It was never normal until after WWII.

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.

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

only existed because of historical circumstances that cannot be replicated

Replace historical with political. Distribution is always political. You want a strong middle class raise top marginal tax rates back up to 70%

hindsightbias• 7 years ago

Maybe a pre-middle class was created by Henry Ford. He wanted to create a car that his workers could afford. Also, maybe Sears with their Homes Catalog. It seems like the teens and twenties included some steps up Maslows hierarchy for some masses.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

Much of Europe still has a strong middle-class. People there can work service jobs and live comfortably. The specific industries that created factory jobs may be in inevitable decline, but the middle-class itself is not. That problem is a political one.

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.

njepa2• 7 years ago

Much of Europe still has a strong middle-class.

Debatable if we factor in the cost of living in many places.

twblalock3• 7 years ago

The rise of populism across Europe, including Brexit, has the same root cause as the rise of populism in America: people believing they have been left behind by the global economy and abandoned by mainstream politicians.

Eridrus• 7 years ago

Another take is that a lot of our productivity gains are being eaten by out of control healthcare costs: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-14/u-s-ec...

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.

blunte• 7 years ago

One of the things that makes a (hu)man is the ability to learn. So what a "man" is after losing one job or career is a person who can learn something new and do something else. That doesn't solve short-medium term financial challenges, but I find it hard to accept that one's life is over if their primary job ends.

NeoBasilisk• 7 years ago

It is depressing to hear from people in the comments that they think a viable solution is to just abandon entire regions of the country. Yes, let's just pack everyone into NY, SF, LA, and Chicago.

With His Job Gone, an Autoworker Wonders, ‘What Am I as a Man?’

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