Posted on 02/22/2010 7:11:49 AM PST by GL of Sector 2814
JANESVILLE, Wis. – In the early dawn, after another week building cars, Michael Hanley leaves his job in Kansas. He quickly zips into Missouri, then heads up a ribbon of highway past grain silos and grazing deer, across the frozen fields of Iowa, over the Mississippi River and into the rolling hills of Wisconsin. Finally, he pulls into his driveway — 530 miles later.
It's one heck of a haul: more than 1,000 miles roundtrip, 16-plus hours of driving, every week.
"I like to say I gave up an eight-minute commute for an eight-hour commute," he says wearily, running a hand though salt-and-pepper hair as he watches his two sons play basketball for the first time this season.
After the aging General Motors plant where he worked for 23 years was idled about a year ago, Hanley faced a Hobson's choice: Stay with his family and search for an autoworker's salary ($28 an hour) in a county where more than 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs disappeared from 2006 to 2009. Or hang on to his GM paycheck and health insurance and follow the job, no matter where it leads.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Your situation is at least understandable. I never quite could understand those folks who move 50+ miles away from their job just so they could get "more house."
I’d say he’s lucky to have a union job, with all the bennies.
I commuted from Central Vermont to NYC for five years, by car and train. Round trip about 800 miles. Sometimes you have to make these choices.
Autoworker? He is probably making more than $28 an hour too. GM should have gone through bankruptcy.
Both of your stories are hilarious. I recall a few years ago we traded some info because I figured we probably knew some of the same people.
Daily! Geez. This is a risk your life drive. Scary stuff.
Seriously. Like I said in my duplicate thread (sorry about that, mods!), I moved around so much as a kid that a lot of people assumed I was an Army brat. The truth was my dad was just a hard working, responsible guy who was willing to go where the opportunities were. This is exactly what most of our forefathers did, or we wouldn’t be American.
I, for one, am grateful, too. It was tough moving around as a kid, and I, too, was heavily involved in school sports like this guy’s kids, but I’m certainly better off having finished high school in North Carolina than I would have where I was born in eastern Kentucky or where I mostly grew up in northern Ohio. A side effect of my dad moving to where the jobs were is the fact that I was in a better position when it was time for me to enter the workforce.
We make what sacrifices we have to to build a better future for ourselves or our posterity. That used to be a fundamental part of our culture, and I sure hope it isn’t as dead as the sentiment behind article suggests.
and lose his insurance while his wife is going through chemotherapy? Yeah. That'd be smart.
find another job? I'm guessing you haven't too much of a grasp on the lack of jobs out there - at the REAL unemployment rate of 18+%. Not to mention - jobs for someone his age - AND give up his retirement package he's worked for for so many years.
I am really, but really, disheartened by the increasingly permeating, knee-jerk judgmental posters in FR these days...and the ever decreasing level of substantive dialog .
FR seems to've disintergrated into a gossip column.
Where have the old Freepers that used to engage in intelligent, nonjudgmental 'conversation' go?
Disheartening. But indicative of the nation as a whole, I'm afraid, a nation that voted in the Traitor in Chief.
I'm guessing that you don't have much of a grasp of this thread so far - I originally gave two possiblities - the other was just move. If you're going to jup in the middle you really ought to read all of what went before prior to making snarkey comments. But to your "point," I'm having a whole lot of trouble working up sympathy for a UAW guy who won't either move or get another job. .
Sound to me that this guy doesn't want to give up a cushy union gig. I can't work up much sympathy for him.
I blow throgh Skillman on my way to Princeton from Norther NJ. 206 is brutal so I take the back roads. Beautiful country-for the first few months. Now I don't even notice. It is a grind.
I was thinking of getting a small studio apartment by work so I could stay there two nights a week-just can't bear the thought of not seeing him every night. I hear they grow up fast.
I referred to myself as a "migrant worker". Instead of bitching about sitting in traffic for the daily 70 mile commute, I purchased a 2009 Kawasaki Versys and turned the commute into my daily recreation. Riding the bike shaved 40 minutes off the commute each direction due to the ability to lane split and use the HOV on ramps.
I did keep my Marine Hybrid in San Diego for foul weather days and grocery shopping. I have the bike back in Idaho now. It isn't getting a daily ride due to the cold temperatures. We started the morning at +5F. We expect a high of +25F today. Not ideal for riding a motorcycle at 75 MPH on the freeway. No need here anyway. I don't have to commute.
Not only that, but he seems to expect (or at least the author seems to expect) the right to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants the job in Kansas, wants to stay in Wisconsin, but has a problem with paying the obvious price inherent in that. In other words, he wants a free lunch.
I just looked on Soutwest, and they have $69.00 one way, web special. But then I would assume he would also have to rent a car?
That's kind of what I got out of the article too.
I didn’t sense anywhere in the article that this guy was looking for sympathy. Why all the animosity here?
Plus tires, maintenance, depreciation and higher insurance premiums.
I think the guy made the only rational choice available to him under the circumstances. This way, his wife’s very expensive medical treatment is paid for by insurance. His family doesn’t have to be uprooted. He doesn’t have to start over in a new career after having put worked for GM for 23 years.
Plenty of families have to move to another state for economic reasons. We did, 6 months ago. Yes, we are thankful that we have a place to live and food on the table.
It isn’t easy for any of us, especially for our kids, who were uprooted rather suddenly from the only home they had ever known. We had no choice, and we did not cause this situation.
Yet, I am certain that if I had spelled out our situation here on FR at the time everything was going to hell, I would have received lots of responses from callous, unfeeling people who have 20-20 hindsight and would have told me where we went wrong.
It always has to be the person’s fault that bad things happen to them, in the view of the crystal ball holders whose lives are perfectly ordered. How else to explain their good fortune, but to take 100% credit for it? They cannot bear the thought that everything is not under their control, that they caught more breaks, had more good luck and/or good timing, had more advantages, than others do.
The rude awakening some of us have had is that one can do everything right in the circumstances, and still be faced with ruin, whether it happens instantly or over a period of a few years — because it is an illusion that we have control over our lives.
Those Southwest specials are like riding the trains. In the words of Mark Twain, “trains take you from where you ain’t, to where you don’t want to be,” and for Southwest you can add, “when you don’t want to go.”
Hope things are going better for you and your family now.
Those callous people will get their "opportunity to grow" eventually; not a wish, just a fact of life.
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