Laid Off!
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 75)
tours of kids,” she recalls. “I always
talked to them. I’d say, ‘Study. Study
hard. Look what I have to do, 3,000 of
these a day.’ ” Still, her $35,000-a-year
earnings kept her at Morgan Mills. “I
thought I’d be there forever,” she says.
Then Sara Lee bought the plant and
closed it in 2003. The company moved
the jobs to Central America.
Kachelries enrolled at a private
business school, but she didn’t make
it to graduation. “I had a nervous
breakdown,” she says. “It was just
everything at one time: school, no
work, I didn’t have insurance, didn’t
have anything. I never thought something like this would happen to me,
ever. It was devastating.” A psychiatrist helped Kachelries through the
trauma, and she still takes medication.
But her business classes (and the help
of a friend) led to a job she loves: as a
Walmart customer-service manager.
“I’m not working as hard," she says,
“and I’m making the same money.”
When a factory closes, the impact on
older workers can be far-reaching,
hurting not just those who were employed at the time of the closing but
also already-retired employees who
were drawing company benefits. This
is especially true when a corporation declares bankruptcy. (See “How
Safe Is Your Pension?” on page 52.) In
2004 the Kaiser Family Foundation
surveyed 2,700 of the 200,000 retired
steelworkers who lost their health coverage when LTV Steel and Bethlehem
Steel failed earlier this decade. Among
the retirees just shy of Medicare age,
about half had postponed doctor visits,
53 percent had skipped taking medication or split their doses, and 29 percent
went without needed hospital care.
Many were forced back to work despite
their own poor health. “The course of
their lives was changed,” says Michelle
Kitchman Strollo, the Kaiser policy
analyst who authored the report.
Stephen Skvara, 61, knows only too
well the consequences of losing health
coverage for family members. He
worked for 34 years as an electrician
at the LTV Steel plant in East Chicago,
Indiana. Even when an auto accident
forced his early retirement in 2000, he
and his wife, Sandra, “had a generous
pension plan, and our health care was
included.” After LTV’s bankruptcy,
Skvara’s pension was cut by a third.
Worse was the loss of his wife’s health
insurance. He qualified for Medicare
because of his disability, but Sandra
was too young. And the couple couldn’t
afford private insurance.
Skvara, who serves on the executive
board of his local United Steelworkers
retiree group, wasn’t alone. One day at
the union hall, a retiree came to him
asking for advice. “He was supposed
to sit down with the doctors and discuss his wife’s cancer treatment—she
had just had a breast removed. But the
hospital wanted to know how he intended paying. I sat with him and said,
‘I don’t know what I can do for you.’”
