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Former Carrollton, Ga., Sony Plant Workers Miss Pay, Friends.
Publication: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Publication Date: 31-MAR-02 |
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COPYRIGHT 2002 Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News
By Bill Torpy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Mar. 31--Tom Williamson now cruises the interstates in one of his eight semis, losing a dime a mile.
Joe Lane strolls the jail corridors at midnight.
Karen Mills desperately misses her friends.
It's been a year since the clattering king winder machines that spooled miles of cassette tape at the Sony Music plant in Carrollton fell silent. The plant shut down March 31, 2001, hurling 400 mostly middle-aged workers from the best jobs they ever knew into a harsh world of corporate downsizing.
The plant, which employed 1,500 workers during the 1980s, had become an anachronism as cassettes went the way of LPs.
The former employees, many of whom had worked at the plant since its 1981 opening, still feel reverberations --- the dread of living without health insurance, cutting corners to save money, enduring the uncertainty of starting a new career when retirement loomed. And there's the lost sense of community, connectedness and belonging.
Mills, 37, who lives in rural Alabama, feels that void. For 18 years, she and...
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