work

My father was a union man, an art school dropout who spent 40 years making the parts that make machines that make glass bottles. How's that for a niche? He worked with his father and his uncles in a shop that is now closed that belonged to a company that no longer exists. How's that for an American story? He earned a wage that provided plenty and a pension, though a paltry one. He still has metal fragments in his hands.

The man who bought this house--my house--when it was new was a union man. After 30 years in the blast furnace of a steel mill, he was ready to sell and retire young when his retirement vanished in a merger. He moved to Pensacola anyway. Last I heard, he was working as a security guard. What else is there to do? Back here, in the life he left, the mill is now idle, has been for months, and thousands like him await their fates.

This county, where I've lived 90% of my life, used to seem 90% a blue collar place, by family if not individual. Brass, steel, oil refining, ammunition (Winchester)-- most people seem to have a connection. And if not for the workers and managers who moved out and up, literally, a good fraction of the houses in my current town need never have been built.

And so when I ask, "now what?" that unorginal question, it is not theoretical, but a concrete query about will happen here when these jobs cease to exist. It's not as if I don't see that labor has run itself off a cliff alongside big business; it's just that I wonder where the bottom is, and how hard it will hurt when we all hit.