The news that Sykes is reducing its workforce by 157 people at its Perry County branch does not shock or disappoint me. It mostly just makes me shake my head in a "I saw this coming" sort of way.
When Sykes first came to the mountains, it was lauded by local officials as one of the best things to hit the region since cable TV. No one could even come up with a bad thing to say about it, and who could blame them, really. Sykes was providing much-needed jobs to a region constantly begging for work and it was providing those jobs by the hundreds. Almost every time one turned on WYMT, there was an upbeat story about how Sykes had just hired a new slew of eastern Kentuckians to answers calls from all over the country.
It was a great new era for eastern Kentucky and a coup for Hazard and Perry County officials (mostly just the former and late Hazard mayor, Bill Gorman, who was instrumental in convincing Sykes to locate in Perry County), who were forever praising the Tampa, Fla.-based company for helping us poor, downtrodden mountain folk by kindly showering us with jobs we seemingly and inexplicably could not make for ourselves.
And then, this era abruptly ended. Sykes closed its doors and sent all its call-center jobs from the Perry County location overseas to reduce costs. And so, their philanthropy was revealed simply as trying to find the cheapest place to located in order to save money. What... a shock.
Only, not really. It's really not a surprise to me that this happened. I wasn't even surprised when a few years after Sykes closed, another company located on the former MTR site that had been "transformed" into the Coal Fields Industrial Park, Trus Joist, closed its doors as well. Now, yet another groups of hundreds of eastern Kentuckians were suddenly without work.
I wasn't surprised because this is what I have come to expect from life in the mountains: the ebb and flow of jobs. Companies come in and bring their positive spin about how they are our saviors with them. They give their jobs and provide security in those jobs for as long as they deem necessary, then they leave. They pack up their telephones and ship out the last of their wood supply, they transfer their higher-ups to other, more "successful" branches in St. Louis or where ever, then they shuttered the doors, leaving those who used to work there to find jobs somewhere else - jobs that are oftentimes none-existent.
I'm not the only one who has come to expect this, either. It's like a way of life in the hills, to always be waiting for the pink slips to be handed out. People can't get settled into a good job for any amount of time longer than about five years before the company they work for starts downsizing in preparation to leave. They toy with us, these companies, to the point where we can't ever begin to think the jobs will stay. And so, we are left in a constant state of flux, never knowing whether or not we can unpack the boxes in our heads that contain confidence in keeping our jobs.
That is, unless you work in the mines or in a job that supports mining. Those jobs are secure, but only because the coal maggots who run the out-of-state companies have a monopoly on the area. "Can't keep your job at Sykes because they keep leaving? Come and work for us because we never leave." At least, that's the message that's portrayed. And why not? It's really a pretty convincing message when you're force-feeding it to people who want to stay in the region, but who either don't have a degree or don't want to work in the medical field, and to people who are just plain desperate for work. This is part of the reason the coal industry thrives in eastern Kentucky.
However, those jobs are not necessarily secure, either. Jobs tied to coal are only secure as long as the coal lasts, and considering the fact that there are only about 30 years - at the absolute most - of coal reserves left in the mountains, the security of these jobs is increasingly brought into question.
So, what are we mountain-folk to do? Keep waiting for "benevolent" CEO's to locate their failing companies here and provide us with 800 jobs for five years? Keep blasting our heritage away for a dirty black rock until we run our own selves out of work with no where to turn when it's all gone?
We have to start thinking outside the box and we have to start creating a sustainable future for the people who live in eastern Kentucky. We need sustainable jobs that will last longer than the whims of absentee company owners and longer than the end of fossil fuel dependance. We need to create a future of job security that brings us out of the doldrums of ebbing and flowing job security. We need local officials who will start calling a spade a spade and end their constant praise of companies who insult us and our work ethic by locating here, paying workers less than what they pay workers at locations outside the mountains, then leaving when they don't make the kind of money they hoped to make here. We need local officials who will look beyond the short-term and envision a long-term way of life for the future of the mountains, and we need them to work with us instead of fighting progress.
Yes, it's hard for many companies to locate to the mountains when King Coal is holding all the cards, and yes it's hard economically when things get tough to keep the doors open, but that's not excuse to keep dragging us mountain folk along while you wait out the time between just laying off 157 people and closing shop for good.
Maybe it's time for us to take the lead here and refuse to allow absentee millionaires decide our fate as a region. We can make those sustainable jobs for ourselves and we can build a brighter future for the mountains ourselves. We just need to stop relying so much on others to help us when they have no real interest in doing so. That much is clear when they continuously keep us bobbing up and down on a jobs roller coaster that is so hard to exit.
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