The Stories Project: Oregon Livelihoods Traded Away

Bob Faust Residence: Nyssa, OR Age: 60 Occupation: Amalgamated Sugar, Maintenance Mechanic Affiliations: BCTGM Local 290G

Snapshots "If CAFTA goes through, Amalgamated Sugar will cease to exist and close up completely." "It's hard for me to put into words what it feels like to be told you no longer have a job. The fellow employees I would run into when I was in town getting groceries were feeling the same way I was. Total shock and disbelief. Not necessarily, 'what am I going to do in the future?'. It was more like, 'I've lost my best friend.'" "" "That was January 19th, 2005 when the plant closed down. We had just finished a campaign, we'd finished clean up. We were scheduled to come back for summer clean up. It was on a Wednesday. We'd been hearing rumors off and on during campaign that the mill was going to close down. But ever since I started working there, there had always been rumors that Nyssa was going to close down. We didn't really see any definite signs of it, rumors, little hints. But everybody thought they were just rumors like we'd heard in the past. " "We came to work on a Wednesday for summer maintenance. Our supervisor didn't come down. Usually we'd meet at 8:00am for toolbox meetings where our supervisor would tell us what project he wanted us to start on first. Our supervisor didn't come down and he didn't show up so people started to think, 'Maybe there is something to this.' Nobody knows. Finally, at 9am our supervisor showed up. He looked sick. He looked upset. You could tell that there was something bad going on. He said, 'There's going to be a general meeting in the lunchroom at 10:00. Don't do anything. Don't touch a thing.' So we knew something was up." "At 10:00 we all assembled in the lunchroom. Nasser, the plant manager came in the lunchroom and made the announcement that the plant was closing down indefinitely. They didn't know for how long. We were to lock up our toolboxes and go home. The question was raised: what do we do about our tools. We were told to lock up our tools and the plant would provide security to make sure they are safe. We were passed out a pamphlet that told us we would receive 60 days of paid leave. Our insurance package was still good. We could still use our insurance. At the end of the 60 days we would receive a severance package. We'd get paid our vacation pay we had built up and we'd receive severance package for up to thirteen years of service. That's the only information we got." "My first reaction was total disbelief. What do we do now? We'd just lost our jobs. We were all kind of like family there. We knew each other's jobs really well. We knew each other's families. We'd hunt and fish and go to each other's parties and card games, birthday parties. Total disbelief that we all lost our jobs. It was quite a shock." "I wasn't ready to go back to dairy farming. You just feel numb like you've been hit in the stomach. Like you'd just lost your best friend." "I haven't personally seen where other people went for work. I know that the majority of people who are getting jobs aren't making the same pay rate they were making at Amalgamated. I hear stories that people are being retrained. Getting schooling. Learning different trades. Some are taking nursing training, welding training, heavy equipment operating classes. " "We took care of each other. If a person had a major sickness and a person ran out of sick leave, we would donate sick leave to that person so that they could keep getting sick leave benefits and we'd put a donation box to collect donations. We have an employee benefit fund. I don't know how many employees donated into that fund but if any individual had a major crisis within their family we pitched in and did what we could to help that person out. On our jobs if a person was working on a particular item that he was struggling with and your partner was elsewhere and he saw you struggling with it, he'd jump in and help you out. Even it wasn't your partner and you were struggling with something. You would pitch in and get the job done. We took pride in our work and our jobs. We took pride in helping one another to get the job done."

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