The Last Shift — Column 3
There’s a town in northeastern Ohio — one of dozens like it — where the biggest employer used to be a stamping plant that made parts for cars. At its peak, 1,400 people worked there. It was the kind of job you didn’t need a degree for but could raise a family on. Union wages, pension, health insurance, a sense that if you showed up and worked hard, the future was reasonably predictable.
The plant didn’t close. It automated.
Today it employs 340 people. It produces more parts than it ever did. The town, meanwhile, has been slowly hollowing out for fifteen years. The hardware store is gone. The diner is gone. The high school graduated 60 kids last year, down from 230 in 2005. The ones who could leave, left. The ones who stayed are figuring out what a town does when its reason for existing has been handed to a machine.
This is what displacement looks like when it isn’t on the news.
Continue reading… “The Dwindling: How the Workforce Hollows Out”