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My dad worked his whole career for Ma Bell. AKA blue collar union job that mostly doesn't exist any more. When he was young (late 50s), the old-timers told him stories about the depression.
What Ma Bell did, during the depression, was cut everyone's hours equally, and they didn't lay off anyone. The phone guys knew they had the loyalty of each other, their union, and their company, and they all survived. No one starved. They got down to where they worked 10 hours a week or less, but no one starved. In the 50s, they reminisced about how those were the best years--they had all the time in the world to camp, to fish, to work on their houses with scrounged materials, to play with their kids.
It's another relic that will unfortunately never come again, that concept of loyalty to and loyalty from a company. I've been laid off, I've been left behind when my friends got the axe. All of it sucks. I'd like to hear about just one company that weathers this economic storm by keeping their workers instead of dumping them like rotten fish.
