Job Security in an Insecure Time | America Inside Out

When you found out you'd been hired by GE, what was your reaction?

"I didn't believe it at first. It really didn't sink in until I got the first paycheck, and I thought, 'I'm really in here.' You'd walk across the parking lot, look all the way down the Avenue at all these antique hundred-year-old buildings, and it really felt like you were part of something that what Kevin Green has been a part of is an iconic company that has built the majority of North America's locomotives for over a century. Without these massive machines pulling freight around the country, the explosion of American industry would have stopped in its tracks."

Kevin's married, no kids, and he's been working as a machinist at GE for 15 years now. "We'd always had ups and downs in the locomotive business. There were layoffs sometimes, but then they would call people back. But this time it really looks like it's going downhill. This one was beating about 47, and that little tin railroad station was built here in Erie."

Kevin's friend, Dottie Rhodes, also works at the plant. "After working all day and after dinner, the back wheels on the round here, but the threat of more layoffs makes it almost impossible to unwind. Last summer, their close friend Denny died of a heart attack after he got laid off from GE, and you have to think that the stress and not knowing what you're gonna do, where the good paychecks are gonna come from, had to be a contributing factor. I don't think they give one whit about the worker. I don't think they give one what about the community that the workers are in. I mean, it's just demoralizing. I don't see any happy ending."

"Well, what are you gonna do?"

"I want to go to school and take up a degree in international business because if you can't beat them, might as well join them."

Things are more complicated for Kevin. "I don't think I could pass a test right now; my concentration is zilch." He's been diagnosed with a severe case of Lyme disease that's been expensive to treat. "I have no idea there was anything in the world besides dementia or Alzheimer's or something that could do this to a person."

"So, let's say, Kevin, you lose your job; your Lyme disease gets worse. What are you gonna do?"

"I don't know; it's looming, you know? It's coming; you're gonna get the tap on the shoulder. You don't know where that must be really stressful."

"It is."

"It is damn cold here."

"Scott, do you ever get used to this?"

"Actually, this is about as warm as I dress in the winter."

Scott Slauson is president of the local union representing GE workers. "Like a famous diner, what the hell, died for with an O? Yes, this is the only area in the world you'll see this. In GE's heyday, they had as many as 22 thousand people working inside those gates, and today there's less than three thousand. It's just a constant bleed of employees out of this plant. Some jobs have been lost to automation, others to globalization, but in recent years they've been lost to the Lone Star State, lured by huge tax breaks."

"GE built a locomotive plant in Fort Worth that's non-union, and workers there are paid less. We watched basically good jobs being ripped out of Pennsylvania and given to the state of Texas, and you're talking a multi-billion dollar corporation that really doesn't need the tax breaks. These decisions affect the entire community; an estimated 1 in 11 jobs in Erie County depend on the plant. There's a lot of fabrication shops and electrical shops that do a lot of work for us, so it's a massive ripple effect."

"GE insists it's laying off workers to stay competitive, especially as countries like China take a bigger share of the market. When you have a business that's running a 25% profit, it's hard to tell the employees we need more money out of your pocket because we're not going to be able to pay the dividend to the shareholders. You know, GE's not the only one. You have a lot of companies that are this way; they thought about competitiveness; it's about union busting."

Scott believes the decline of unions is a big part of the problem. "Fifty years ago, a third of the US workforce was unionized. Well, stand up and fight back; it's down to 11 percent today, and the gulf between the rich and everyone else is wider than ever before."

"I'll see why he can't get you out of that, talking back in the client light, but Scott's members make two and a half times more than the average salary here in Erie, about 70 grand plus benefits. There is an argument that global competition has put a lot of pressure on these corporations, sure, and that unions got too powerful; they got too greedy and they got lazy."

"What's your reaction when people say you guys make too much an hour?"

"What do you do for a living? That's what I ask. We handcraft a four hundred and sixty thousand-pound locomotive. There's a lot of pride in building something that you know is going to run for 20 years pulling freight across the United States. And when you lose that sense of pride, sometimes you lose that sense of purpose, and that's what we're seeing. People turn to drugs and alcohol, and some just say, 'I'm gonna kill myself.'"

"Sure, we've had quite a few suicides just from our workers. Seven o'clock on a Friday night, it was the middle of the shift, and we were working, and the machine I was on faced this fella's machine. I looked over where he was working, and he was hanging on the crane; he had a choker around his neck, his knees were bent, and he was not moving, and he was about as white as your paper on the counter, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at."

"In 2017, Erie’s suicide rate reached an all-time high. The average victim: a 47-year-old white male. But the problem isn't unique to this city. A recent study revealed a shocking spike in the death rate for middle-aged white working-class Americans caused by alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicides."

"I think a lot of people are feeling that despair, especially if you had a lucrative job and you're facing a change where you're going to go back into living hand-to-mouth like you were before. They don't know what the future holds."

"I don't know what it holds either, but I'm gonna find out."

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