Son first

Thursday morning I listened to National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" as I drove to work. They were airing a segment on how a South Carolina town is managing in the face of manufacturing and textile plant closures. A reporter interviewed a soft-spoken man named Fred Salter, who once worked for Springs Industries, a major home furnishings supplier. The Springs Industries website says, in a section detailing its putative corporate values:

"We expect change, and we seek to anticipate and manage its impact by investing in new technologies and in our people."

Salters says that the company bought t-shirts for its employees that said: We Support NAFTA. Perhaps that's what it meant by "investing in our people," because in 2006 it shifted its manufacturing to Brazil. I suppose none of us really expects anything companies say to have any connection to what their leaders actually believe.

To be clear, there's little question, among the economically informed, that global trade is of tremendous benefit to the majority of the earth's inhabitants, at least in the long run. But as Salters notes, while the company "spent a lot of time and money trying to convince us that change is good. . . it wasn't necessarily good for employees who were going to be pushed out of jobs." Conservatives often, I think, would have us forget those costs, while liberals would use them as an excuse for protectionism that ultimately consigns millions to poverty. Both neglect, in other words, the actual stories of actual human beings.

And so here is this actual human being, Fred Salter, who retrained to become a nurse's assistant, because "they can't send those jobs south." I don't know if Fred Salter is on the whole a good or bad person, and I suspect he is like most of us, some of each. But the subject turned to his mother, who is so stricken with Alzheimer's that she's even forgotten how to sneeze. Fred has foregone re-employment, for the time being, so he can care for her, so that she doesn't have to go into a medical facility. "It doesn't seem like you can find anything good in any of these layoffs," he says, "but I'm laid off now, and I can help with my mom."

It's hard for a man to go on national radio and announce that he has no income, no job. Our jobs are often how we define ourselves. But here is Fred Salter, likely sinner, likely saint, defining himself not by his work, but by his relationship, as son to a mother who needs him.

Joblessness is one of my great fears, and caring for a debilitated loved one doesn't lag far behind. But to Fred Salter, the loss of his job meant that he got the training that he now uses to take care of his dying mother. I don't know if his example was the lesson NPR was hoping I'd take to heart, but it's one I won't soon forget.