On Saturday last week, the small bakery on my street closed. It was open for forty years. The man who made the bread is sixty-five. He is tired. His son does not want to make bread. The shop sold good bread, and many cakes for birthdays. My family went there every week. Now we go to the supermarket. The bread is not the same. The shop is empty. There is a small sign on the door.
The local clothing factory in the town of San Marcos closed last week after thirty years. About a hundred women lost their jobs. The factory made school uniforms for the region.
The factory was small but important. Many of the women had worked there for more than fifteen years. Most of them are over fifty.
Maria Lopez, 56, was one of the oldest workers. "I have made school uniforms for the children of this region all my life," she said. "My own children wore them. My grandchildren wear them. Now they will be made in another country, and the children here will still wear them, but the women in this town will not make them."
The owner of the factory said the closure was difficult but necessary. The workers will receive small redundancy payments. The local school is collecting money to help the older workers, who may not find new jobs easily.
The Riverbend hospital's maternity ward closed for good last week, after thirty-four years of continuous service. The closure was announced six months ago by the regional health authority, which said the ward had become 'too small to be safe'. Forty-two staff members will move to other hospitals; eight have decided to retire.
The ward delivered the last baby on Thursday morning. The mother, Amelia Cortes, who works at the school across the road, said she had been told her child would be 'a small piece of local history'. She added: "My mother was born here. I was born here. My daughter will be the last. I am proud and I am sad. Both."
Dr Lara Mendoza, who has worked on the ward for nineteen years, said the closure made medical sense but emotional damage. "The numbers are real," she said. "Small wards are harder to keep safe. But the women of this town will now travel forty kilometres to give birth. That is not a small thing in February."
The regional health authority confirmed that all staff had been offered roles in other hospitals. The local council said it would press for a community-health centre to be opened in the building, but warned that decisions of this kind 'do not move quickly'.
The ward's small chapel, where many families had prayed during difficult labours, will be kept open while the rest of the building is reorganised. A small ceremony of thanks is planned for next month. The first baby born on the ward, in 1990, has agreed to attend.
When the night-shift forewoman at the Tarrik shipyard, Olga Petrova, hung up her hard hat in the locker she had used for thirty-one years at six o'clock on Friday morning, she was closing a working life that had begun in the same building under a different government. The yard, which had built fishing vessels and small ferries since 1962, was officially closed at the end of the previous shift. Two hundred and ten workers lost their jobs. The yard's parent company, an international maritime group with operations in three countries, described the closure as 'a difficult but necessary alignment of capacity with demand'. The phrase has done a great deal of work in announcements of this kind for the last three decades.
The yard had been declining for years. At its peak in the 1980s, it employed around 700 workers and produced six vessels a year; by this spring it produced two and employed barely a third of that workforce. The reasons given by the company were familiar: cheaper construction in Asia, lower demand for the kinds of vessel the yard specialised in, and the cost of compliance with newer environmental regulations. Each of these was, at one level, true. None of them quite explained why the closure happened in this particular year, on this particular site, rather than three years earlier or two years later.
A strike in May lasted nineteen days and ended without success. "We knew we could not save it," said Mikhail Rubin, who has worked at the yard for fourteen years. "What we could do was make sure the closure was not silent. There is a difference between losing your work and losing your work without saying anything. We struck for the difference." The local union representative, Sara Volk, said the redundancy payments were at the legal minimum. "They paid what they had to pay," she said. "They could have paid more. They didn't."
The yard's manager, Konstantin Aliev, who has worked there for twenty-eight years, was visibly uncomfortable when asked about the company's framing of the closure. "I will not pretend the market forced this," he said. "The market made it harder. The decision was made by people, in a meeting, on a particular Tuesday. I am the manager because I am here for the workers. I am not here to repeat the company's words."
The town of Tarrik will feel the closure for a long time. The yard's payroll was the largest in the local economy. The school across the road has been losing pupils for a decade as younger families have moved away in search of work, and the closure will accelerate the next round. The mayor, Anna Sokolov, has begun a regional consultation about the site's future. "We are talking to two companies," she said. "I cannot name them yet. These conversations move slowly. The workers cannot wait two years to know what comes next."
On Monday morning, the yard's gates were locked. Olga Petrova had returned with her grandson, who is eight and has wanted to be a welder since he was four. She did not say much. She showed him the slipway, where the last ferry had been launched in March. They walked back to the car. "He will be something else," she said when I asked. "He will be something else, and that is also fine. It just won't be this."
When the night-shift forewoman at the Tarrik shipyard, Olga Petrova, hung up her hard hat in the locker she had used for thirty-one years at six o'clock on Friday morning, she was closing a working life that had begun in the same building under a different government. The yard, which had built fishing vessels and small ferries since 1962, was officially closed at the end of the previous shift. Two hundred and ten workers lost their jobs. The yard's parent company, an international maritime group with operations in three countries, described the closure as 'a difficult but necessary alignment of capacity with demand'. The phrase has done a great deal of work in announcements of this kind for the last three decades. What it conceals, in this case, is a sequence of board-level decisions taken over the previous fourteen months, in which the Tarrik site was successively reclassified as non-core, then under review, then designated for closure. None of these decisions was made by capacity or by demand; they were made by named individuals.
The yard had been declining for years. At its peak in the 1980s, it employed around 700 workers and produced six vessels a year; by this spring it produced two and employed barely a third of that workforce. The reasons given were familiar: cheaper construction in Asia, lower demand for the kinds of vessel the yard specialised in, and the cost of compliance with newer environmental regulations. Each of these was, at one level, true. None of them quite explained why the closure happened in this particular year, on this particular site.
It is at this point in articles of this kind that the conventions propose a particular sequence: a paragraph quoting an older worker, a paragraph quoting a younger one, a paragraph from the manager, a paragraph from the company, a closing image of the empty slipway. The sequence is not stupid; it has been refined over decades, and it organises complicated events into something a reader can hold. It also performs a particular kind of work. By spreading responsibility across a familiar cast, the form produces a sense that the closure is sad but inevitable, an event for which no one in particular is responsible. This is a kind of reading the form has been training its readers to perform for forty years.
A strike in May lasted nineteen days and ended without success. "We knew we could not save it," said Mikhail Rubin, who has worked at the yard for fourteen years. "What we could do was make sure the closure was not silent. There is a difference between losing your work and losing your work without saying anything. We struck for the difference." The line is not a political analysis, but it is a piece of working-class moral reasoning that the genre has carried, in slightly different forms, for at least a century. The local union representative, Sara Volk, said the redundancy payments were at the legal minimum. "They paid what they had to pay," she said. "They could have paid more. They didn't."
The yard's manager, Konstantin Aliev, who has worked there for twenty-eight years, was visibly uncomfortable when asked about the company's framing of the closure. "I will not pretend the market forced this," he said. "The market made it harder. The decision was made by people, in a meeting, on a particular Tuesday. I am the manager because I am here for the workers. I am not here to repeat the company's words." The honesty of the answer is unusual in the genre and is worth registering. Most managers, asked the same question, would offer a version that left more room for the company's account.
The town of Tarrik will feel the closure for a long time. The yard's payroll was the largest in the local economy. The school across the road has been losing pupils for a decade as younger families have moved in search of work, and the closure will accelerate the next round. The mayor, Anna Sokolov, has begun a regional consultation about the site's future. "We are talking to two companies," she said. "I cannot name them yet. These conversations move slowly. The workers cannot wait two years to know what comes next."
I have, at the bottom of my notebook, a closing image — Olga's empty locker, the open door, the small sticker of a vessel her father had welded in 1979 still on the inside — that I had been preparing to use. I have decided not to use it. The image would do its work; the reader and I would feel briefly that the article had ended; and the workers in Tarrik would still be where they are. I would prefer to end somewhere less resolved: with Mikhail looking for industrial work in another region; with Konstantin, who is fifty-five and will need his next job soon; with Sara, who is already preparing for the next closure, which on present trends will arrive within eighteen months; and with Olga's father, who is still alive and has not yet said what he thinks, and who will, like other people in his position, have a longer view than the rest of us.
What I am still working out, after twenty-two years of writing about closures of this kind, is the relationship between the small piece I am about to file and the slow accumulation of pieces like it that my colleagues and I have produced in regional and national papers since around the time the term 'restructuring' began to do most of its current work in the language. The piece I am about to file is on the closure of a textile factory in a town where my mother went to school, although my mother does not know this, because we have not spoken in a way that would allow it to come up since around the same time. The factory employed two hundred and ninety women. My mother's classmate's daughter, who I do not know, was one of them. I will not be quoting her. She has not asked to be quoted. Her absence from the piece is not a matter of editorial discretion; it is a matter of my having spent four days in the town and having failed, in ways I am not entirely proud of, to find the route by which she might have agreed to speak.
The form into which the piece will be placed has been refined over the last several decades to a remarkable degree of efficiency. There is a paragraph for the older worker, a paragraph for the younger one, a paragraph for the manager who is uncomfortable with the company's framing, a paragraph for the mayor who is talking to two unnamed companies, a paragraph for the union representative who has handled three closures in the region in the past five years and is preparing for the next one, a paragraph for the academic literature on retraining outcomes, and a closing paragraph that, depending on the writer's recognisable mannerisms, either uses or refuses a closing image of the locked gates, the empty car park, the silent chimney. I will not pretend I have not produced versions of these paragraphs. I am producing one now, in a different register, on a Saturday afternoon, in a different town, having failed to interview the daughter of my mother's classmate.
The convention of this kind of essay would now produce a paragraph in which I describe what I would do differently, having recognised the limits of the form. I have one prepared. I am declining to use it, not because the limits are not real but because the redemptive paragraph is itself a recognisable feature of essays in this register. It would do its work; the reader and I would feel briefly that the essay had earned its weight; the daughter of my mother's classmate, who works at a different factory now because the textile factory closed three years ago, would still be where she is. There is no version of this essay that reaches her, and pretending otherwise — by way of a paragraph naming what I should have done differently — is a small consolation I am declining to offer myself.
What the essay can do, and what I am trying to do here, is something narrower. It can hold open a question that the form does not hold open. The question is how the cumulative effect of forty years of well-intentioned long-form journalism about industrial closures has interacted with the cumulative effect of forty years of corporate language about industrial closures, and whether the relationship between the two is closer to opposition or closer to a kind of mutual sustenance that neither side has quite admitted to. I think the relationship is closer to mutual sustenance than the journalism, on its own behalf, would like to acknowledge. I think the journalism has, across thousands of well-meant pieces, helped to make closures feel like weather events. I think the form has done its work, and that the work has not been the work the writers thought they were doing.
A serious objection presents itself: that what I have just described is itself a sophisticated form of self-presentation, in which the writer claims credit for noticing the form's complicity while continuing, in subtly altered form, to do the form's work. I think the objection is correct. I think there is no version of this essay that escapes it. The most that can be said is that the version of the essay that does not name the objection is doing the same work less honestly, and that the slight worsening of the writer's position relative to the reader, which the naming produces, is a price worth paying.
The daughter of my mother's classmate works at a logistics depot two valleys over. I have her name on a piece of paper. I have not contacted her. I am not going to contact her in order to write this paragraph, because doing so would convert the paragraph into the moment of its own resolution, which is the kind of move I have just spent the previous paragraphs explaining is the form's most reliable self-flattery. I am ending here, with her name on the paper, on the desk, and with the essay not having reached her. That is not a closing image. It is the description.
How useful did you find this text? Leave a rating and a comment to help other teachers.