The comments section on this article makes me sad to be a part of the HN community.
Show some empathy for a man who lost the best thing he ever had. He isn't asking for the world, actually in the article he didn't ask for anything. He was content to make $25 an hour forever and spend it on his family's health and happiness. That's a reasonable thing to want from life in America. Nit picking the particulars of his case isn't useful.
If you say "just move" or "get a new job" or "shoulda seen it coming" consider what you'd feel like if you lost your job of 2+ decades and that job had not helped you develop other marketable skills.
Not every person can have a high-skilled and transferable job like a software engineer.
I think the part that makes it hard to emphasize with this case rather than others (someone who became disabled and is unable to work and can't get social services, their work has been not fruitful enough for economic migration, or any of the other regular cases that pop up on HN that do draw out empathy). At what point do you understand the job is no longer secure? I feel like GM particularly has been such a popular dead horse to beat this article seems weird. 2008 financial crisis with the bailouts? The thousands of newspaper articles? When the majority of parts are made by secondary parties instead of GM? The constant layoffs and other plant closures?
I feel there is at least a minimum of 15 years of warning signs that the average person on the assembly line is going to get cut eventually and at least 8-9 announced layoffs that did just that. In that article he explicit references watching other plants suffer the same fate he later did. I have no idea how someone in his position would feel their job is secure other than blind faith, especially because the white collar jobs have been cut just as much as the blue collar ones at the auto manufacturers. He also seems to have actual skills (article references working in the paint shop) compared to others that he might not be quantifying accurately and I hope that he's able to figure that out after looking back on his tenure.
The only thing I feel is something I can emphasize with in this article is the part about feeling trapped in the local health care network that makes it not as feasible to do any sort of economic migration at the risk of not being able to recover the critical health services that they would have lost. If this was the primary point of the article I feel it would resonate better.
It’s so crazy to me how many people on here assume that whatever the market determines must be fundamentally morally correct in all situations. Like the premise is always how come all these poor people chose NOT to be successful?
Show some empathy for a man who lost the best thing he ever had. He isn't asking for the world, actually in the article he didn't ask for anything. He was content to make $25 an hour forever and spend it on his family's health and happiness. That's a reasonable thing to want from life in America. Nit picking the particulars of his case isn't useful.
If you say "just move" or "get a new job" or "shoulda seen it coming" consider what you'd feel like if you lost your job of 2+ decades and that job had not helped you develop other marketable skills.
Not every person can have a high-skilled and transferable job like a software engineer.