DIYbanter - View Single Post - Does anyone really need to be a billionaire?

Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...

Clearly the original employment conditions were overly generous.

We'd need to know why that was so and whether it was done
at a time when those employees were hard to find and if that
later changed significantly so there was no longer any need
to offer such attractive working conditions to attract enough
good enough employees and to get them to stay.

They had to offer good wages and benefits to get workers to stay.

The jobs was easy and clean for the most part. It was the hours that
made for a large turn over. The plant had to run 24 hours a day and no
shutdowns for anything 365 days a year.

Most of the jobs were on rotating 8 hour shifts. You worked 7 of the 3
rd shift off two, worked 7 of the 2nd , off 2, worked 7 of the 1st and
off 4 days, and repeated. There was a preferred crew that worked Mon,
Tue, wed on 2 nd and Fri, Sat on the 1 st to take up the slack in the
hours.

That went on from around 1965 to the big change in the 80's or so.
There were plenty of jobs in the area up to that time . They did not
pay nearly as much. The company went out of business about a year ago.

It made polyester material from the raw chemicals. Made 3 products.
One looked like a bale of cotton. ONe looked like an unbraded string
that mainly went into tire cord. The third and smallest was called
chip. Pieces of plastic that were about 1/4 inches long and 1/8 inch
square that things like the 2 liter soft drink bottles are made of.
That is right, the same thing the drink bottles are made of is 99.5% of
what people wear is made from.

Stuff went mainly overseas.

Even with some some of the better pay in the area, for many years they
would bring in about 20 new workers almost every month and be lucky to
have 5 of them to stay over a month and even some of those would leave
in less than a year.

There were about 2500 hourly workers and another 500 salaried of which
about half of them worked a regular day shift.