Corporate America

I rarely talk about what I do for a living, because frankly it's not all that interesting. The most interesting thing about it, I suppose, is that I am able to support my family on a single income, which is increasingly rare these days. This is not because I make a lot of money, mind you; I make shit, to be honest. But we're good at managing what we have, and living within our means. I don't have a cell phone, and I finally just got a vehicle from this century only because my 17-year-old Accord was about to blow after 225K miles. The only indulgences are DirecTV and Netflix.

I work, as I have through most of my adult life when I wasn't playing music, in manufacturing. I like the idea of making something tangible that has intrinsic value. These days it's a desk job in logistics, with a huge component of interdepartmental communications, including between departments that hadn't traditionally gotten along. I'm fortunate in that I like what I do, I'm pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. I've found that for many people, none of those things happen very often.

When I first started with my current company a few years ago, the facility was basically a medium-sized fish in a small pond. Things were busy, which is always better than the alternative. About a year ago, all the facilities from our company were snapped up by a much bigger corporation. They immediately sent envoys from corporate headquarters to talk up their great health plans, tuition reimbursement opportunities, internal talent development, blah blah blah. Nothing like a good handjob on company time. And counterintuitively, despite oil and commodity prices ramping up drastically, we became busier and busier. Job security.

A couple of smaller places were closed during the spring and summer, and their workloads moved to our facility, but they had been glorified FDCs (forward distribution centers) anyway. If you can schedule things properly, lower and more efficient shipping costs can easily offset commercial rental space in metropolitan areas. And much of the additional work we took on fell directly in my lap. Hence the 50-hour weeks as of late. Again, not a problem. The extra cash offset the gas price increases in my 80-minute round-trip commute, and I appreciated that they felt that I could handle the extra work.

So it was a rude awakening last week for us to be collectively called up and told that the plant is closing. This is what happens when competitors buy each other, folks, and it ain't pretty. The severance package is a joke, and the only silver lining is that the closing will take some time. Many places do not have that luxury, obviously, so it can't really be taken for granted. But the whole thing is being framed as a necessary business decision driven by tough economic times, never mind that the ginormous corporation has sufficient resources to ride the storm out.

But it ain't the first time, and it won't be the last, and many people have faced far worse circumstances. Most of us land on our feet, eventually. But a couple things about this stick in my craw.

One is the basic idea worth considering, on this holiday which celebrates the working stiff, that perhaps people work better, harder, and smarter when they don't feel like they constantly have to look over their shoulders. Should people have to worry that, even as they're being glad-handed with all sorts of temporary blandishments, they are mere months from being sold down the river so that someone's stock rises half a point?

I think not; I think a large measure of Americans' chronic unhappiness can be found in that, besides being fat and teevee-addled, they know they have no real job security. They're afraid to take vacations, because they're petrified that the company might figure out they can get along just fine without them. They're stressed because frequently they're clinging to a job they despise, with people they detest, simply because the market sucks and they know they're lucky just to have a shitty PPO plan. I was lucky; as I said, I liked the work and the people, and the health plan was pretty good. Many people have to take what they can get.

But the thing that really pissed me off was when it was time to go in to discuss severance policies and what-not. The woman who had been sent over from corporate was polite and professional enough, and launched immediately into the hortatory nonsense of this being the beginning of an "adventure". Look, lady, I'm 41 and I have a family to support; I got that adventure shit out of my system over a decade ago.

Plus I work 50 hours a week, commute another ten, and had been planning on going for an MBA. That seems like quite enough "adventure". It connotes a feeling that we had become sedentary and complacent in our sinecured positions, obviously an inherently offensive insinuation. By taking on extra work, trying to be a team player, I had simply been cutting my own throat all summer. She didn't have an answer for that. They never do.

But they have to do what they're told, and when their turn comes, and a stranger gets dispatched from afar to cut them off at the neck, I'm sure they'll understand. We've all become used to the dynamic, which may be the worst part about it.