EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA
Merrimack Valley
The faces of Lucent: Plant closes, but life goes on for former employees
North Andover plant closes, but life goes on for former employees
Published: December 21, 2008
Editor's note: With Lucent having officially closed the doors of its North Andover plant Friday, we talked with three longtime employees of the company that once employed upward of 12,000 people locally to see how they're faring.
Maddie Carrier, 67, of Pelham, N.H., is a hairdresser now, but in 1959, in what she refers to as a different lifetime, she became a loyal employee of Western Electric, later Lucent. It was there she met her future husband, a tradesman for the company.
Back then, Carrier was even afforded the luxury of taking a 15-year leave of absence to raise her kids, who also later became employees.
"When the company would hire new people, they would hire the whole family if you wanted," she said.
That was the best of times at the now defunct company, said Carrier, who worked in shipping and receiving.
But when Western Electric changed hands, she said, things went from great to good to much worse.
"The company just went downhill," Carrier said. "They started outsourcing all our work. ... We would come in to work for eight hours and have nothing to do."
Finally in 2001, Carrier's husband gave in and took the second of two back-to-back severance packages of $40,000. He's been unemployed since.
A month later, she was forced into a third severance package of $72,000.
Mike Lanza of Haverhill is a student on the brink of a new career. The problem is, he is also a 48-year-old who plans to retire in 10 years.
In July, when Lanza's 28 years as an electronic technician with Lucent came to a close, he had a contingency plan. When he learned the plant was to close last year, he enrolled at Middlesex Community College in Lowell to obtain a second associate degree, in biotechnology.
All over the country, biotechnology jobs are replacing traditional manufacturing jobs, which are being sent overseas and to parts of the country where labor is cheap and unions are nonexistent.
"From the 1990s, things at Lucent kind of just dwindled," Lanza said. "They kept telling us, 'We have to send this product overseas to get people in a certain country to buy it.' Then they'd move the whole product line there and nothing new would ever replace it."
Lucky for Lanza, his former union, Communications Workers of America, provided a federal assistance program that pays for his education. This summer, he'll graduate.
"I've put Lucent behind me," Lanza said. "It's not part of my life anymore."
Michael Hodge, 47, of Methuen was one of the lucky ones — sort of. He and 10 other workers were the last to leave the Lucent offices Friday, when it closed its doors for good.
"The place is a skeleton," he said from work on Wednesday. "It used to be like a little city in there. Now it's like being in a ghost town."
Hodge may have survived the layoffs and the buyouts, but that doesn't mean he's any better off than the thousands he once worked alongside.
Hodge, who worked at the company in shipping and receiving since he was 18, is at a loss as to what his next move will be.
"I'm forced into a career change," he said. "I'm looking to get some training, but no one pays what we're making here."
The current economic climate makes it especially difficult.
"No one's hiring," Hodge said
— Anna Fiorentiino
