How do displaced workers cope with job loss? Is the adjustment of workers confronting a shutdown today different from the adjustment of those who were put on the shelf in the mid-1970s? Comparison of longitudinal data from a Mason City, Iowa, meat-packing shutdown in the mid-1970s with responses to similar items from workers displaced when a major automotive supplier firm in Wisconsin closed in 1980 and from respondents who lost their jobs in farm-manufacturing and meat-processing closures in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1981 indicate that job loss is still the plight of the individual worker and his or her immediate family. Workers continue to cut back on expenses, extend their informal network of relatives and friends for employment possibilities, and, where possible, send a spouse into the work force.
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References
1.
1. Paper submitted for the course “Introduction to Sociology” Sociology 30B, Luther College, 1983, p. 1.
2.
2. Des Moines Sunday Register, 13 Feb. 1983.
3.
3. Ibid.
4.
4. Kenneth A. Root and Patricia L. Brinkmann, “Why Work? Views from Displaced Workers and Welfare Recipients” (Paper delivered at the Southwestern Social Science Association, Houston, TX, 12-15 Apr. 1978).
5.
5. Sean Damer, “Life after Linwood? The Loss of the Cash Nexus, or Deindustrialization in the Periphery” (Paper delivered at the British Sociological Association Conference, Cardiff, Wales, 5-8 Apr. 1983).
6.
6. Herbert H. Hyman, “The Effects of Unemployment: A Neglected Problem in Modern Social Research,” in Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research, ed. R. K. Merton, James Coleman, and Peter Rossi (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 287.
7.
and Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New York: Dryden Press, 1940).
8.
8. E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Worker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 267.
9.
9. Harold L. Sheppard, Louis A. Ferman, and Seymour Faber, Too Old to Work—Too Young to Retire (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960).
10.
10. Richard C. Wilcock and Walter H. Franke, Unwanted Workers (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963).
11.
11. Social Effects of a Factory Relocation: A Case Study of Social and Political Consequences of Job Displacement (Toronto: Religion-Labour Council of Canada and United Steelworkers of America, 1965).
12.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13.
13. See Kenneth A. Root, “Workers and Their Families in a Plant Shutdown” (Paper delivered at the American Sociological Association Meetings, Chicago, 5-9 Sept. 1977).
14.
14. See Greg Hookset al., “Small Towns and Factory Closings: Impacts and Alternatives,”Small Town, pp. 7-13 (Jan.-Feb. 1982).
15.
15. See Philip Langerman, Richard Byerly, and Kenneth Root, Plant Closings and Layoffs: Problems Facing Urban and Rural Communities (Des Moines: State of Iowa, 1982), esp. chap. 7.
16.
16. Respondent names are fictitious; both quotations are from the 1975 Mason City closure.
17.
17. Terry F. Buss and F. Stevens Redburn report that 60 of 146 terminated workers were unemployed one year after the closure of the steel mills. Buss and Redburn, Shutdown at Youngstown: Public Policy for Mass Unemployment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 93.
18.
18. “Technical-Professional Unemployment: Middle-class Adaptability to Personal Crisis,”Sociological Quarterly, 17:264 (Spring 1977).
19.
19. “A Psychological Study of Job Loss: Worker Reactions to a Plant Closing in a Company Town in Southern Appalachia” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1977).
20.
20. Kenneth A. Root, “Job Loss and Job Losers: Variability in Response to Displacement” (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, San Francisco, CA, 1-4 Sept. 1978).
21.
21. L. Eugene Thomas, Esther McCabe, and Jane E. Berry, “Unemployment and Family Stress: A Reassessment,”Family Relations, 29:517 (Oct. 1980).
22.
22. Herbert S. Parnes and Randy King, “Middle-aged Job Losers,”Industrial Gerontology4:86 (Spring 1977).
23.
23. The Psychology of Social Classes: A Study of Class Consciousness (New York: Russell and Russell, 1949), pp. 76-77.
24.
24. The options were presented in the following order: middle class, working class, lower class, and upper class. Data from the Mason City study were collected just prior to the shutdown, and again seven months after closure, and the data for this table are from those displaced workers who had not transferred one year after the closing. For the entire sample (n = 85) at the fourth interview Mason City workers were distributed as follows: upper class, 1 percent; middle class, 27 percent; working class, 68 percent; and lower class, 4 percent.
25.
25. “Social Stresses on the Family: Generic Features of Families under Stress,”Social Casework, 39: 144-145 (Jan. 1958).
26.
26. Root, “Workers and Their Families in a Plant Shutdown.”
27.
27. Colin Bell, Oisten Eriksen, Geir Nybo, and Kenneth Root, “Cross-cultural Analysis of Support Systems for Unemployed Workers and Their Families” (Paper delivered at the National Council of Family Relations Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 14-16 Oct. 1982).
28.
28. Kenneth A. Root, “Coping with Job Loss: The U.S. Case” (Paper delivered at the British Sociological Association Conference, Cardiff, Wales, 5-8 Apr. 1983).
29.
29. Kenneth A. Root, “Family Response to Job Loss Stress” (Paper delivered at the American Sociological Association Meetings, Toronto, Canada, 24-28 Aug. 1981).
30.
30. This point is also stressed by Jeane Prial Gordus, Paul Jarley, and Louis A. Ferman, Plant Closings and Economic Dislocation (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1981), p. 157.
31.
one example of a recent addition to this body of theory is Leonard I. Pearlinet al., “The Stress Process,”Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, 22 (Dec. 1981).
32.
32. Helping Adolescents Cope with Unemployment Stress, Dubuque, IA, branch of the American Association of University Women, 1983.
