A factory is more than just steel and sweat. It is people.
Jason Rearick/ The Citizen
Sandy Zamniak has been with Bombardier for almost 10 years. She will most likely go into retirement while taking care of an ailing family member.
Sandy Zamniak has been with Bombardier for almost 10 years. She will most likely go into retirement while taking care of an ailing family member.
It is the person who lives next door, the father of your children's friends, the woman who is out for a run or walking her dog as you pick up your morning paper.
And so, on the first day of what is expected to be the last week of operation at the Auburn Bombardier plant, which manufactures rail and aerospace parts, we recognize the more than 160 men and women who work for Bombardier, as well as those who were employed at the plant anytime in its extensive history.
Some have worked there for just a few years, others for their entire career.
For a few, this week has been looked upon with dread.
For many, it is time to move on.
Their stories begin.
DAN HEAD
Dan Head walked out of high school the day he turned 16. Shortly thereafter, while working at a feed mill, he realized he had made a big mistake.
Head has since made up for it tenfold, by taking - and placing in the top of his class - in numerous welding, electronics and refrigeration courses, as well as earning his GED while serving as a torpedoman's mate technician in the Navy during the early 80s.
And so when Head heard that Bombardier was hiring, he knew he would fit right in.
“Every job I've ever had, since I was in the service, has had 'maintenance' in its title,” says Head, who was born and raised on a Venice Center dairy farm but never felt inclined to take the agriculture route. “I'm a fixer.”
Through the years, Head moved from assembler to welder to his current position as maintenance technician. Like most Bombardier employees, the news of the plant's impending closure hit hard.
“I'm 44 years old,” Head says, “Who the hell wants to go out and find another career?”
But he did just that. Within weeks of the company's announcement, Head had updated his resume with assistance from Auburn Document Center. He has since passed the tests and interviews at Crucible and will start there in the next few months.
A man who has been laid off before, Head says he was never all that concerned about not finding another job.
“I got skills,” Head says in a confident but not cocky manner. “I can do anything.”
MICHELE FITZSIMMONS-EVENER
Michele Fitzsimmons-Evener is stuck in some sort of strange purgatory. She's not quite unemployed, but she's not quite employed either.
“I know people are kind of caught in a rut,” she says, the orange earplugs that she uses to block out the loud machines hanging around her neck. “It's like we're closing, but it's like it's a long wait to think about what you're going to do with the rest of your life.”
File for unemployment? Go back to school for an accounting degree? Look for another manufacturing job? Right now, it's all up in the air.
Back in January, when Fitzsimmons-Evener learned of the plant's closure, the decision of who to break the news to first was a lot easier.
“When I got home, I called my father and told him first,” recalls Fitzsimmons-Evener, who has had four generations of family work at the Auburn plant throughout its extensive history of names and products. “I knew it would bother my father. That was hard. I know how much this place has meant to him for so long after 40 years.”
And to her as well. She was the first female vice president of the local United Steelworkers union, and her paychecks have gone to support her three girls, ages 10, 14 and 17.
Fitzsimmons-Evener thinks that the family finances will be OK for the time being; her husband works at International Wire. But she's eager to find another job and to learn what the rest of her life has in store for her.
Despite being stuck in this purgatory, Fitzsimmons-Evener has made it through her denial phase, a stage that she says almost everyone at the plant has fallen victim to.
“It was like it wasn't really happening, it was like it wasn't closing,” she recalls of February union negotiations with Bombardier, who she said offered a fair severance package. “When people start leaving (for other jobs), that's when it kind of hits you.”
KEVIN SULLIVAN
Layoffs happen.
That was the message that Kevin Sullivan received from his union buddies a few years ago, as they pushed him to go back to school to get a degree. No one ever knows what's going to go on in the future, and you need to have a back-up plan, they would tell him.
Since learning of Bombardier's impending closure, such advice seems golden to Sullivan, who in May finished his mechanical technology degree at Cayuga Community College.
“Thank God I started college when I did,” he says.
A large cup of coffee and the pale pink hue of his eyes are a dead giveaway that the past two years of full-time school and full-time work have not been easy. A typical day for Sullivan was waking up at 7 a.m., attending classes in the morning, welding planes' fuel systems until midnight at the plant, and returning home to complete about an hour-and-a-half of homework.
Need more reason to be impressed?
He'll graduate with a 4.0 grade point average - and a new job. Since March, he's also been working part-time at his new place of employment, a small design firm in East Syracuse. Further down the line, he'll pursue a four-year degree.
Sullivan had originally planned to retire from Bombardier. If it had been good for so many of his older co-workers, he thought, then it would work for him, too.
So the news of the Auburn plant's closure came as a shock, and the company's actions before and after the announcement, were frustrating to witness.
“It's getting to the point where if they tell you the sky is blue,” he says, “you want to go outside and make sure they're not lying to you.”
JOE BENNETT
Joe Bennett pauses a moment, fighting the emotions that inevitably come to the surface. He takes off his glasses and puts his thumb and index finger to his eyes, wiping the tears that come at his recalls March 31, 2006.
It was the day he turned 50 - and, after 31 years, it was his last day of work at Bombardier.
“You spend more time awake with those people than you do with your family,” Bennett said of his co-workers.
Bennett's ties to the Auburn plant run deeper than his own employment there. His father retired from the factory a month after Bennett started, having put in three decades of his own. Bennett recalls with fondness the family weekends and open house days at the factory and hearing the now-extinct morning, lunch and 5 p.m. whistles a la “The Flintstones.”
During previous layoffs at Alco or Bombardier, Bennett had sought employment elsewhere but always returned to the Auburn plant when he was asked back.
“I always looked forward to the people,” he recalled, noting that a favorite past-time among co-workers was to bust each other's chops. “For the diversity of people, everybody got along well.”
He learned to take it all as the local union president for the past three years.
But even that position didn't give him an inside scoop as to the plant's closure; Bennett concedes that he was just as clueless as everyone else.
At the time of the announcement, Bennett had already been looking for another job - 31 years in one place was enough - and he landed one as a janitor at Cayuga Community College, where he has now worked full-time since mid-March.
Yet the assurance of a new job and the support of his colleagues didn't make it any easier to walk out the door on that last day.
“It was tough,” Bennett says, his voice catching.
STEVE LaMUNION
Don't get him wrong - Steve LaMunion likes his new position. It's just not the same.
“I miss working there,” LaMunion says of Bombardier. “It's hard to start over.”
LaMunion took a job in November with DaimlerChrysler, doing similar work to what he had done at the Bombardier plant during his manager years. He hadn't wanted to leave his co-workers - his friends - but felt he had no choice.
With the aerospace industry declining and the plant's Long Island Railroad production coming to a close, LaMunion knew in his gut that the Auburn factory did not have much life left.
He told his co-workers point blank why he was leaving but slipped quietly out the door on his last day to avoid the emotion of it all.
“I felt bad leaving,” LaMunion says from his Baldwinsville home, after his lengthy daily commute back from Utica. “I felt like I was abandoning people, like I wanted to take them with me.”
Though he was saddened to hear that his premonitions had been correct, the news of Bombardier's closure has at least given him peace that he made the right decision. He smiles as he recalls the good ole days at Bombardier, like when famed racer Roger Penske came to Auburn because of the plant's manufacturing of Detroit Diesel engines.
Yet at the same time that he is getting settled in with his new position, there is that nagging feeling always with him that any day, it could all happen again.
Before LaMunion was hired at Bombardier in 1988, he had been laid off from Bendix Corp. in Utica - and was out of work for a year-and-a-half.
“It doesn't matter if you're the guy who sweeps the chips off the floor of if you're a manager,” LaMunion says, noting the difficulty in starting from square one again. “Every day you go to work, you need to know you're fighting for your job.”
LEON DEFENDORF
A few months ago, as he listened to Bombardier officials announce the likely closure of the plant, Leon Defendorf could feel his heart pumping. He wife Heather had given birth to the couple's second child just five months before.
As the sole income for the family - his wife stays home with the children rather than give up most of a potential paycheck to daycare - Defendorf is now searching for a job somewhere in the Auburn area, where both his and Heather's family live.
“As soon as they shut the doors, I'm mailing out my resume to every company I can find,” says Defendorf, who tried working at McQuay International for a few days but later determined that it would be better to stay at Bombardier to receive his full severance.
The family now lives paycheck to paycheck, so after Bombardier closes, “I've got to make whatever I get plus unemployment stretch,” says Defendorf, noting that his wife might have to get a job while he is searching for one.
For now, he is working his 12-hour shifts as usual, blasting, priming and topcoating the frames of railroad cars. He tries not to think about what's to come.
“I wouldn't say the shock's worn off yet,” Defendorf says. “It probably won't until they actually shut the doors.”
Defendorf's mother-in-law and great-aunt are also employed at the plant. The latter, now 63, helped Defendorf get the job back in 2000, when he was an inexperienced 19-year-old high school graduate.
That, and he bugged the woman from human resources to give him a chance.
Now he's hoping to catch another break. “We'll find something,” he says optimistically. “I'll find something.”
PAM LOCKHART
At 18 years old, Pam Lockhart entered the manufacturing sector because it was good money. Now 49, she is facing the possibility of having to take on two, maybe three jobs to cover her current living expenses.
“(I'll be) seeing if anybody hires 50-year-old manufacturing people,” says Lockhart, who predicts she'll have to take a 50 percent cut in pay at her next manufacturing job. “I don't know what else to do. That's all I've ever done.”
After being laid off from Piper Aircraft in Florida in the mid-80s, Lockhart worked for various factories before landing a job at Bombardier.
She was employed as a fabricator for two years, and then as a production expediter for another two. Six years ago, she switched over to the non-union position of supervisor, a position, she says, that didn't make her any more privy to anymore information about the closing.
Though Lockhart is concerned about her finances for the future - divorced, she is dependent on her income alone - she recognizes that there are co-workers in even worse situations.
“You're not going to take 50-to-60-year-old workers...when you've got 20-year-old kids that can be there for a long time,” Lockhart says, noting some employers might also worry about having to pay greater health care costs for older employees.
Lockhart knows that she has a tough road ahead of her, but her 30-year-old son, Jeff, a Bombardier employee until recently, has found another job.
Two months ago, he started at Nucor Steel in Auburn. Her son-in-law, Leon Defendorf, also a Bombardier employee, is still looking.
DICK ROBERTS
Dick Roberts almost didn't become a Bombardier employee. After doing a mediocre job on his practical welding test, the company said thanks, but no thanks.
Mind you, Roberts was running a 104-degree temperature the day of his test, and the fact that his NyQuil gave him the shakes wasn't much help either.
But after considering the circumstances - and reviewing his recommendations and record of experience - Roberts received a call the following day, offering him a position.
It is a position that Roberts is sad to see go.
“I love that job,” he says sincerely. “The thing I love about that job is that there are such a variety of parts for such a variety of aircraft that it's never mundane, it's never the same thing twice. Not only do you get to use your head and your hands, you get a sense of accomplishment.”
Barring a six-month period when he was enrolled in welding school - he switched careers at age 42 after working for 26 years in the automotive technician and transmission business - Roberts hasn't been unemployed since entering the workforce at age 14.
He doesn't plan to end that streak any time soon.
Thanks to publicity about Bombardier's closure, Barber Welding has offered him a position, one that requires only a small (and Roberts predicts temporary) pay cut.
Roberts, a real man's man with his tattoos and a dark brown-gray beard and pony tail, is also taking this new phase of his life to start up his own custom motorcycle business, Pale Witch Customs, with a friend.
It had always been in the cards, says Roberts, taking a drag from his cigarette, but Bombardier's closure “gave it a little push.”
SANDY ZAMNIAK
It's as though Sandy Zamniak has time-warped back 10 years, to when officials at the TRW plant in Union Springs delivered the news that the factory would be closing. Zamniak, then 55, knew she would have to get another job, and she looked hopefully to Bombardier.
Now, it's deja vu all over. Her place of employment is closing shop again.
“We all looked at each other and said, 'Here we go again,' ” Zamniak says, noting that several of her co-workers have also been through plant closures before.
Shortly after Bombardier officials announced their intentions, Zamniak learned that a member of her family was suffering some health problems. The one-two punch, she says, is difficult to take.
But on a professional level, in comparison to some of her co-workers, she considers herself lucky. At the time of the announcement, she had planned to retire in the near future, and the severance terms allow her to receive her health insurance into retirement because she's been there nearly a decade.
“I was very fortunate, but I do feel sorry for the others,” Zamniak says.
Last fall, Zamniak went to the plant second-shift as usual, but she knew that something was up when little things around the factory, from security to stockpiling, began to change. She loves her job - identifying airplane tubing by stamping - yet dreads going to work nowadays. Morale, she says, is as low as it gets.
“They all want to get out of there,” she says, noting that she herself would like it to be over and done with.
And so, on the first day of what is expected to be the last week of operation at the Auburn Bombardier plant, which manufactures rail and aerospace parts, we recognize the more than 160 men and women who work for Bombardier, as well as those who were employed at the plant anytime in its extensive history.
Some have worked there for just a few years, others for their entire career.
For a few, this week has been looked upon with dread.
For many, it is time to move on.
Their stories begin.
DAN HEAD
Dan Head walked out of high school the day he turned 16. Shortly thereafter, while working at a feed mill, he realized he had made a big mistake.
Head has since made up for it tenfold, by taking - and placing in the top of his class - in numerous welding, electronics and refrigeration courses, as well as earning his GED while serving as a torpedoman's mate technician in the Navy during the early 80s.
And so when Head heard that Bombardier was hiring, he knew he would fit right in.
“Every job I've ever had, since I was in the service, has had 'maintenance' in its title,” says Head, who was born and raised on a Venice Center dairy farm but never felt inclined to take the agriculture route. “I'm a fixer.”
Through the years, Head moved from assembler to welder to his current position as maintenance technician. Like most Bombardier employees, the news of the plant's impending closure hit hard.
“I'm 44 years old,” Head says, “Who the hell wants to go out and find another career?”
But he did just that. Within weeks of the company's announcement, Head had updated his resume with assistance from Auburn Document Center. He has since passed the tests and interviews at Crucible and will start there in the next few months.
A man who has been laid off before, Head says he was never all that concerned about not finding another job.
“I got skills,” Head says in a confident but not cocky manner. “I can do anything.”
MICHELE FITZSIMMONS-EVENER
Michele Fitzsimmons-Evener is stuck in some sort of strange purgatory. She's not quite unemployed, but she's not quite employed either.
“I know people are kind of caught in a rut,” she says, the orange earplugs that she uses to block out the loud machines hanging around her neck. “It's like we're closing, but it's like it's a long wait to think about what you're going to do with the rest of your life.”
File for unemployment? Go back to school for an accounting degree? Look for another manufacturing job? Right now, it's all up in the air.
Back in January, when Fitzsimmons-Evener learned of the plant's closure, the decision of who to break the news to first was a lot easier.
“When I got home, I called my father and told him first,” recalls Fitzsimmons-Evener, who has had four generations of family work at the Auburn plant throughout its extensive history of names and products. “I knew it would bother my father. That was hard. I know how much this place has meant to him for so long after 40 years.”
And to her as well. She was the first female vice president of the local United Steelworkers union, and her paychecks have gone to support her three girls, ages 10, 14 and 17.
Fitzsimmons-Evener thinks that the family finances will be OK for the time being; her husband works at International Wire. But she's eager to find another job and to learn what the rest of her life has in store for her.
Despite being stuck in this purgatory, Fitzsimmons-Evener has made it through her denial phase, a stage that she says almost everyone at the plant has fallen victim to.
“It was like it wasn't really happening, it was like it wasn't closing,” she recalls of February union negotiations with Bombardier, who she said offered a fair severance package. “When people start leaving (for other jobs), that's when it kind of hits you.”
KEVIN SULLIVAN
Layoffs happen.
That was the message that Kevin Sullivan received from his union buddies a few years ago, as they pushed him to go back to school to get a degree. No one ever knows what's going to go on in the future, and you need to have a back-up plan, they would tell him.
Since learning of Bombardier's impending closure, such advice seems golden to Sullivan, who in May finished his mechanical technology degree at Cayuga Community College.
“Thank God I started college when I did,” he says.
A large cup of coffee and the pale pink hue of his eyes are a dead giveaway that the past two years of full-time school and full-time work have not been easy. A typical day for Sullivan was waking up at 7 a.m., attending classes in the morning, welding planes' fuel systems until midnight at the plant, and returning home to complete about an hour-and-a-half of homework.
Need more reason to be impressed?
He'll graduate with a 4.0 grade point average - and a new job. Since March, he's also been working part-time at his new place of employment, a small design firm in East Syracuse. Further down the line, he'll pursue a four-year degree.
Sullivan had originally planned to retire from Bombardier. If it had been good for so many of his older co-workers, he thought, then it would work for him, too.
So the news of the Auburn plant's closure came as a shock, and the company's actions before and after the announcement, were frustrating to witness.
“It's getting to the point where if they tell you the sky is blue,” he says, “you want to go outside and make sure they're not lying to you.”
JOE BENNETT
Joe Bennett pauses a moment, fighting the emotions that inevitably come to the surface. He takes off his glasses and puts his thumb and index finger to his eyes, wiping the tears that come at his recalls March 31, 2006.
It was the day he turned 50 - and, after 31 years, it was his last day of work at Bombardier.
“You spend more time awake with those people than you do with your family,” Bennett said of his co-workers.
Bennett's ties to the Auburn plant run deeper than his own employment there. His father retired from the factory a month after Bennett started, having put in three decades of his own. Bennett recalls with fondness the family weekends and open house days at the factory and hearing the now-extinct morning, lunch and 5 p.m. whistles a la “The Flintstones.”
During previous layoffs at Alco or Bombardier, Bennett had sought employment elsewhere but always returned to the Auburn plant when he was asked back.
“I always looked forward to the people,” he recalled, noting that a favorite past-time among co-workers was to bust each other's chops. “For the diversity of people, everybody got along well.”
He learned to take it all as the local union president for the past three years.
But even that position didn't give him an inside scoop as to the plant's closure; Bennett concedes that he was just as clueless as everyone else.
At the time of the announcement, Bennett had already been looking for another job - 31 years in one place was enough - and he landed one as a janitor at Cayuga Community College, where he has now worked full-time since mid-March.
Yet the assurance of a new job and the support of his colleagues didn't make it any easier to walk out the door on that last day.
“It was tough,” Bennett says, his voice catching.
STEVE LaMUNION
Don't get him wrong - Steve LaMunion likes his new position. It's just not the same.
“I miss working there,” LaMunion says of Bombardier. “It's hard to start over.”
LaMunion took a job in November with DaimlerChrysler, doing similar work to what he had done at the Bombardier plant during his manager years. He hadn't wanted to leave his co-workers - his friends - but felt he had no choice.
With the aerospace industry declining and the plant's Long Island Railroad production coming to a close, LaMunion knew in his gut that the Auburn factory did not have much life left.
He told his co-workers point blank why he was leaving but slipped quietly out the door on his last day to avoid the emotion of it all.
“I felt bad leaving,” LaMunion says from his Baldwinsville home, after his lengthy daily commute back from Utica. “I felt like I was abandoning people, like I wanted to take them with me.”
Though he was saddened to hear that his premonitions had been correct, the news of Bombardier's closure has at least given him peace that he made the right decision. He smiles as he recalls the good ole days at Bombardier, like when famed racer Roger Penske came to Auburn because of the plant's manufacturing of Detroit Diesel engines.
Yet at the same time that he is getting settled in with his new position, there is that nagging feeling always with him that any day, it could all happen again.
Before LaMunion was hired at Bombardier in 1988, he had been laid off from Bendix Corp. in Utica - and was out of work for a year-and-a-half.
“It doesn't matter if you're the guy who sweeps the chips off the floor of if you're a manager,” LaMunion says, noting the difficulty in starting from square one again. “Every day you go to work, you need to know you're fighting for your job.”
LEON DEFENDORF
A few months ago, as he listened to Bombardier officials announce the likely closure of the plant, Leon Defendorf could feel his heart pumping. He wife Heather had given birth to the couple's second child just five months before.
As the sole income for the family - his wife stays home with the children rather than give up most of a potential paycheck to daycare - Defendorf is now searching for a job somewhere in the Auburn area, where both his and Heather's family live.
“As soon as they shut the doors, I'm mailing out my resume to every company I can find,” says Defendorf, who tried working at McQuay International for a few days but later determined that it would be better to stay at Bombardier to receive his full severance.
The family now lives paycheck to paycheck, so after Bombardier closes, “I've got to make whatever I get plus unemployment stretch,” says Defendorf, noting that his wife might have to get a job while he is searching for one.
For now, he is working his 12-hour shifts as usual, blasting, priming and topcoating the frames of railroad cars. He tries not to think about what's to come.
“I wouldn't say the shock's worn off yet,” Defendorf says. “It probably won't until they actually shut the doors.”
Defendorf's mother-in-law and great-aunt are also employed at the plant. The latter, now 63, helped Defendorf get the job back in 2000, when he was an inexperienced 19-year-old high school graduate.
That, and he bugged the woman from human resources to give him a chance.
Now he's hoping to catch another break. “We'll find something,” he says optimistically. “I'll find something.”
PAM LOCKHART
At 18 years old, Pam Lockhart entered the manufacturing sector because it was good money. Now 49, she is facing the possibility of having to take on two, maybe three jobs to cover her current living expenses.
“(I'll be) seeing if anybody hires 50-year-old manufacturing people,” says Lockhart, who predicts she'll have to take a 50 percent cut in pay at her next manufacturing job. “I don't know what else to do. That's all I've ever done.”
After being laid off from Piper Aircraft in Florida in the mid-80s, Lockhart worked for various factories before landing a job at Bombardier.
She was employed as a fabricator for two years, and then as a production expediter for another two. Six years ago, she switched over to the non-union position of supervisor, a position, she says, that didn't make her any more privy to anymore information about the closing.
Though Lockhart is concerned about her finances for the future - divorced, she is dependent on her income alone - she recognizes that there are co-workers in even worse situations.
“You're not going to take 50-to-60-year-old workers...when you've got 20-year-old kids that can be there for a long time,” Lockhart says, noting some employers might also worry about having to pay greater health care costs for older employees.
Lockhart knows that she has a tough road ahead of her, but her 30-year-old son, Jeff, a Bombardier employee until recently, has found another job.
Two months ago, he started at Nucor Steel in Auburn. Her son-in-law, Leon Defendorf, also a Bombardier employee, is still looking.
DICK ROBERTS
Dick Roberts almost didn't become a Bombardier employee. After doing a mediocre job on his practical welding test, the company said thanks, but no thanks.
Mind you, Roberts was running a 104-degree temperature the day of his test, and the fact that his NyQuil gave him the shakes wasn't much help either.
But after considering the circumstances - and reviewing his recommendations and record of experience - Roberts received a call the following day, offering him a position.
It is a position that Roberts is sad to see go.
“I love that job,” he says sincerely. “The thing I love about that job is that there are such a variety of parts for such a variety of aircraft that it's never mundane, it's never the same thing twice. Not only do you get to use your head and your hands, you get a sense of accomplishment.”
Barring a six-month period when he was enrolled in welding school - he switched careers at age 42 after working for 26 years in the automotive technician and transmission business - Roberts hasn't been unemployed since entering the workforce at age 14.
He doesn't plan to end that streak any time soon.
Thanks to publicity about Bombardier's closure, Barber Welding has offered him a position, one that requires only a small (and Roberts predicts temporary) pay cut.
Roberts, a real man's man with his tattoos and a dark brown-gray beard and pony tail, is also taking this new phase of his life to start up his own custom motorcycle business, Pale Witch Customs, with a friend.
It had always been in the cards, says Roberts, taking a drag from his cigarette, but Bombardier's closure “gave it a little push.”
SANDY ZAMNIAK
It's as though Sandy Zamniak has time-warped back 10 years, to when officials at the TRW plant in Union Springs delivered the news that the factory would be closing. Zamniak, then 55, knew she would have to get another job, and she looked hopefully to Bombardier.
Now, it's deja vu all over. Her place of employment is closing shop again.
“We all looked at each other and said, 'Here we go again,' ” Zamniak says, noting that several of her co-workers have also been through plant closures before.
Shortly after Bombardier officials announced their intentions, Zamniak learned that a member of her family was suffering some health problems. The one-two punch, she says, is difficult to take.
But on a professional level, in comparison to some of her co-workers, she considers herself lucky. At the time of the announcement, she had planned to retire in the near future, and the severance terms allow her to receive her health insurance into retirement because she's been there nearly a decade.
“I was very fortunate, but I do feel sorry for the others,” Zamniak says.
Last fall, Zamniak went to the plant second-shift as usual, but she knew that something was up when little things around the factory, from security to stockpiling, began to change. She loves her job - identifying airplane tubing by stamping - yet dreads going to work nowadays. Morale, she says, is as low as it gets.
“They all want to get out of there,” she says, noting that she herself would like it to be over and done with.
