I would imagine that some here could relate to the stories of hard work at low wages and couldn't keep up the pace for too may years, their bodies taking too hard a beating.
As for me, what strung a note was the woman who was skilled in making musical instruments, eventually watching her job go to China. I lost my job twice to the orient, but it wasn't a manufacturing job, rather an engineering job in product design for the electronics industry. The first time in 2002, my last year there I spent some of my day training my counterpart in Taiwan. The second time was in 2015 where projects got started in the USA, then after the "smart" work was done, the projects transferred to Malaysia. The company I had worked for, at it's peak in 1999 had 160,000 employees, most worked in the USA. Today it has around 8000 employees, most work outside the USA. I am grateful to have lasted as long as I did, but it was so hard to watch the many thousands of people before me loose their job. The main hall to the cafeteria at lunchtime used to be so full of people. At the end of my time there, you could roll a bowling ball down that hall during the lunch hour and nobody would notice. The 300 acre campus is sold with most of the company buildings slated to be torn down. What remains of the company at that site fills just one building today employing about 800 people of which many are from foreign countries here on work visas. I've been back there doing a little contract work helping the remaining product development skeleton crew. Walking the halls, I feel like I am in Asia.
You can imagine my feelings about jobs. I found myself politically similar to most of the people who were interviewed in that article.
Back to the subject matter. Because of the lack of turnover at Phoenix, it sounds like they do things quite differently than at the other places the article mentions. It is the privately owned companies that see beyond the penny.
