Back in 2001, I had frequent meetings at Lucent Technologies in North Andover, Mass. They were negotiating a new contract with their union. One day, I found myself chatting with some union employees, and they talked about what they expected to get with the new contract.
I suggested they might not want to push too much, as Cisco was coming on strong and had no union. I remember the response like it was yesterday: “Lucent will never close the Merrimack Valley Works. They have too big an investment here.”
Well, the union got everything they wanted, and they weren’t shy about telling me how wrong I was.
Unfortunately, a few months later, Lucent decided to “divest itself of its manufacturing assets.” The Merrimack Valley Works and Lucent’s other manufacturing facilities were closing. I don’t know how many people worked at this plant when it closed, but they had 12,500 people working there in its heyday. The Bell Labs folks moved to another facility, but the manufacturing employees lost their jobs. The vast majority never found anything comparable. That last contract priced them out of the market.
The short-lived euphoria turned to surprise, then anger and rage in many cases. Employees in their 40s and 50s had worked there for 20 or 30 years. They were making good money and didn’t want to start at the bottom somewhere else. As time went on, they were more willing to start at the bottom, but again, couldn’t find anything comparable.
Lucent wasn’t the only company outsourcing jobs to the Far East. A lot of other companies were doing the same. Twenty or 30 years before, these folks could have worked at any number of electronics manufacturing plants, but by 2001, many of those had gone away.
Now, here we are in 2024, and it doesn’t look like we’ve learned a whole lot in this regard. Boeing’s machinists’ union, 33,000 strong, is on strike, effectively crippling the already troubled company. If Boeing goes down, where do these folks think they’d ever find comparable jobs?
Yes, I know inflation is killing all of us. Everybody wants more, but sometimes demanding more, too much more, kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
These Boeing employees may never have heard of Lucent Technologies and their divestiture of manufacturing, but I would hope the union hierarchy would know about it. So many manufacturing jobs have been outsourced offshore in the last few decades that, when a manufacturer shuts down, too many workers can’t find anywhere else to go.
Additionally, Boeing is our largest exporter, reportedly responsible for 5% of our GNP. Have you looked at our balance of trade recently? We can’t keep outsourcing our jobs and our money.
Who said anything about outsourcing?
Well, if Boeing shuts down, many of those orders will go to Airbus. Admittedly, Airbus is already over capacity. Additionally, the Chinese are getting into the airframe manufacturing business.
The American dream was created by manufacturing. When you do it right, the sum of the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts. The difference between the two is what enabled people of all levels to buy homes and so many other good things like expensive health care, etc.
I remember going to Detroit, “the Motor City,” in the late 80s. They had been the automotive manufacturing capital of the world. When people started buying Toyotas, Nissans, VWs and other cars, Detroit closed one plant after another. I was driving by once-beautiful buildings that were all boarded up. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more destitute.
Years ago, I was looking at something in a department store and got tapped on the shoulder by an engineer who used to work for me. He was embarrassed when he noticed that I had seen his badge indicating he was an employee for the store.
“Ron, I was running out of money. This was all I could find.”
“Do you like it?” “Are you kidding? I’m working twice the hours for one third the money. My wife has been sick, and our health insurance is a joke. Forget about putting the kids through school; I don’t even think we can keep the house.”
It’s a sad story, replicated all too often.
I can only hope it doesn’t happen again. It’s easy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s very difficult to revive it or find another one when they’re all leaving.
