NYT: At Closing Plant, Ordeal Included Heart Attacks

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/us/25stress.html?partner=EXCITE&ei=5043

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: February 24, 2010

The first to have a heart attack was George Kull Jr., 56, a millwright who worked for three decades at the steel mills in Lackawanna, N.Y. Three weeks after learning that his plant was closing, he suddenly collapsed at home.


Doug Benz for The New York Times
Bob Smith had a heart attack.


Less than two hours later, he was pronounced dead.

A few weeks after that, a co-worker, Bob Smith, 42, a forklift operator with four young children, started having chest pains. He learned at the doctor’s office that he was having a heart attack. Surgeons inserted three stents, saving his life.

Less than a month later, Don Turner, 55, a crane operator who had started at the mills as a teenager, was found by his wife, Darlene, slumped on a love seat, stricken by a fatal heart attack.

It is impossible to say exactly why these men, all in relatively good health, had heart attacks within weeks of one another. But interviews with friends and relatives of Mr. Kull and Mr. Turner, and with Mr. Smith, suggest that the trauma of losing their jobs might have played a role.

“He was really, really worried,” George Kull III said of his father. “With his age, he didn’t know where he would get another job, or if he would get another job.”

FULL story at link.

[HughBeaumont]

1. No Replacement.

Absolutely NO replacement careers. That, my friends is one of the most shit-stupid aspects of Laissez-fail economics.

You ship one industry/factory off, FIND A REPLACEMENT. Not "Economics 101". Common Sense 101.

Your economy cannot just come to a dead stop HALT because business moves faster than the speed of humans. It's criminal and despicable to think that jobs/careers should only be made for the heavily degreed and privileged.