What an idiotic article about an idiotic person. He can’t move? Or can’t he just get a different job? I suppose as an autoworker, he’ll never find anything that pays half as much for doing so little, but what rule says that you next job has to pay as much as the current one?
Quoting the article:
Hanley didn't want to lose his health insurance while his wife, Laura, was receiving costly chemotherapy treatments for a blood disease that will likely lead to cancer. The medical bills last year, she says, were in the tens of thousands of dollars.
"There's no way I could possibly go through one treatment without him having insurance," she says.
Not exactly an "idiotic" reason, hm?
Not realistically in this economy. I have a friend here in S.E. Michigan who lost his job with the GM Tech Center. He found another one in either Atlanta or North Carolina. Fortunately he kept the home and left the wife there while he rented an apartment because 6 months later the work dried up and he was laid off.
Had he permanently moved he would have taken a loss on selling the house and he and the wife would have been stuck in another state away from the entire family while once again being unemployed.......
He can move, and, if you read the article, will move, after his kids finish their school year (and I’m guessing his wife finishes a year contract working for a school).
And, given the state of the Michigan economy, who says he can even get a different job where he is by taking a pay cut? A lot of times employers are reluctant to hire workers at big pay-cuts from their old job if they have other candidates with comparable qualifications that they would be giving a pay increase (has something to do with estimations of whether the new hire will keep looking for work to get back his or her old earnings rate).
It’s just a human interest story about the state of the economy.
My wife does the once a week commute to another state routine, but it’s easier for us: it’s a solution to an academic ‘two-body problem’, and she only has to do it 36 weeks out of the year, and be away an average of 4 days a week, some weekends I go to here place instead, and all our kids are grown (well, almost, we still have one who’s home from college most weekends thanks to a girlfriend who’s still in HS). Of course when I was on sabbatical, and instead of KS and OK we were spread between PA and OK, and I told a colleague at Penn about it I found out his family was normally split between PA and CA (the ‘bicoastal couple routine’), but that year between PA and Prague!
It’s a weird lifestyle made possible only by marginally free telecommunications: pay you ISP fees and uses Skype at no additional cost, or buy the right cell-phone plan and don’t pay any extra for calls to your loved ones.
No doubt he doesn’t want to disrupt his family’s lives, yank his kids to a new town and new school, etc. A lot of people face the same issue.
Autoworker? He is probably making more than $28 an hour too. GM should have gone through bankruptcy.
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.