My father was a 45-year veteran employee of the tire and rubber product manufacturing giant Uniroyal, Incorporated.
In 1979, my family returned home to Naugatuck, Connecticut — also the company's home base. We had finished a three-year assignment in Rome, where my father led the company’s Italian operations.
When I asked if we could stop at the Rubber Shop, where we always bought Keds sneakers made in the town’s factories, my mother’s eyes met mine. “The store shut down,” she said, “and the factories are leaving too.”
I was only 14, but I knew that people depended on factory wages. "What had happened?" I wondered.
Sadly, by the 1980s, the company began shutting the doors on its rubber factories. By 1990, French tire maker Michelin bought what was left of the company, and Uniroyal was no more. Thousands lost their jobs.
Writ large, this small story of my family and one company is also the universal story about the rise and fall of the American factory town. What happened on Naugatuck’s riverbanks happened on riverbanks across the U.S. Yet the people of Naugatuck believed that Uniroyal’s factories would always be there. Some still cling to a hope that the company will return.
The fact is, that hope is unrealistic — and it’s critical that employers, workers and schools start acknowledging this change and responding to it appropriately.
The proof is in the stats. The U.S. lost some 7 million factory jobs since 1979, the peak of manufacturing employment. The culprit includes smarter technology, shifting demographics, and the lure of manufacturing to the lowest-cost provider, usually overseas. No matter how dogmatically politicians lay their plans for bringing manufacturing back to America, no matter how financially dependent years-long factory workers are on their factory jobs, those jobs aren't coming back.
For my father to stay at Uniroyal as long as he did while the industrial age was in its death throes, he had to learn how to stay relevant. He created his own work opportunities within the company at a time when few roadmaps existed to guide him. My father was one of the lucky ones. In retrospect, I realize he struggled not only in an environment of closing factory towns but during a seismic shift in the relationship between American companies and employees. In Naugatuck, people believed that a job with Uniroyal was a job for life. But career choices narrowed, job ladders shrank. Today, long-term job security, especially in factory towns, is essentially gone.
On our present course, United States policymakers are failing, once again, to deal with a looming workforce transition. Our shores will be home to fewer corporate headquarters, which means more traditionally white-collar workers will have to create their own jobs and opportunities. Even the agile and adaptable are not safe. Robots and automation are replacing the jobs of lawyers, surgeons, taxi drivers, bartenders — and yes, even coal miners. A rift will emerge between people who can thrive in the new ways and those who are trapped by the old. We all must drive our own careers now, whether we are self-employed or working for a company.
Rather than wait for the inevitable collision or turn a blind eye to its approach, there are simple things that employers, workers and schools should do to help the workers of today and tomorrow buckle in:
Schools, and especially universities, should emphasize experience-based learning — the real stuff.
Educational institutions must teach students how to identify their passions and signature skills that are adaptable across jobs. Classes should focus on how younger workers can jump from job to job and monetize their talents because companies won’t offer vertical career ladders. And we need training: As factory CEOs told Trump back in February, some good manufacturing jobs are to be had, but the U.S. workforce isn’t qualified to fill them.
We all need to take charge of our careers.
This process is threefold. It begins with adopting an entrepreneur mindset. That is, making it a mission to stay relevant and to create new work opportunities — whether inside an organization as a regular employee or externally as a consultant or contractor.
It also means continually scanning the horizon by stepping back to rise above the day-to-day and observe the bigger picture: where their organization or activity is headed, how it is positioned within its sector, what the outside forces and trends are that will impact success.
Finally, taking charge of one’s career means being intentional about continuing to develop ways to add value and stay relevant and resilient in the workforce, ready and able to embrace change when it’s time.
Companies need to offer on-the-job activity-based learning and career guidance.
They must help cultivate a new generation of HR practices, mentoring relationships and other career development opportunities to guarantee they have the steady supply of the nimble, qualified workforce they need.
Overall, the business sector has done a lousy job of redefining its relationship with its employees since the days of my father. And perhaps workers have come to expect too much from their employers. Why had my dad stayed at Uniroyal so long? “They had been so good to me,” he told me recently. But today’s workers can’t count on goodwill anymore.
To combat this, let’s arm tomorrow’s workers with adaptable skills and entrepreneurial know-how for lifelong career development — not pickaxes and hydraulic drills. The answer is forward, not backward into the mines or onto the assembly lines.
