Ralph Mowery wrote
Rod Speed wrote
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.
But that isnt necessarily so true later.
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.
But generous benefits arent the only way to make an operation like that
viable.
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.
Because that industry changed over time with most of
it now happening in china where they don't need to
offer anything like the same very generous benefits.
That's why apple doesn't even make any hardware in the USA anymore.
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.
Nothing like that percentage of what people wear is polyester.
Stuff went mainly overseas.
And now mostly comes from china.
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.
For better benefits or because they didn't like the work ?
There were about 2500 hourly workers and another 500
salaried of which about half of them worked a regular day shift.
And now its mostly done in china and the consumers get much
cheaper products and the US economy still works very well indeed.