I got a settlement out of that. I settled out of court. But I didn't know
how long I'd live because they'd keep putting it off. Another thing that
the Brown Lung is trying to do is speed up the cases because people is
dying. We had two people to die here in the last three or four weeks in
our association down in Columbia. All the money in the world won't bring
my lungs back. My lungs are just about gone. I don't know how long I'll
live, nobody knows how long they'll live far as that goes, but the
future generation down the line is what we want to do. I got people
coming in there, grandson, and other people got people going to work.
That's honest work. Mill work's all right. I've been proud to be a mill
worker, but I didn't know that they's doing us that way. I was loyal to
them, worked overtime for them, but when I got disabled, they wanted to
kick me out with no pension, nothing. I was just lucky to get that
twenty-two dollars a month. They didn't tell me it was a hazard to my
health. I don't want the future generation to come up with something
like this. I'd heap rather buy clothes here made in America, than go
over here to Korea, China, or Japan. I don't want to see nobody lose
their job, but they create their own unemployment. They'll go overseas
and buy this high speed machinery and put in these mills. The people are
getting old, and these machines are speeded up and used. They'll cut
out, and if you can't run them, they'll lay you off and try to get some
new people in there. They're going to get sick on down the road just
like us if they don't clean them up. They'll lay off
a bunch of people that ain't able. After you get a little bit of age on
you, you slow down.
When I went to work, they had a "E" Model loom. They advanced to XD's and
XK's and things, more speeded up, more advanced. That's good, I like to
see people and technology advance. They went to the moon, I's glad they
could do that, but the company says it can't clean up because it's too
much. But we got a chart here. In 1978, it cost 4.2 million dollars for
people to be out of work, disabled. That's in 1978, that's what cost the
tax payers. That should be the mill's duty. They'll tell you, there's a
lot of people in the association, when they get to where they can't
work, can't hold a job, they'll say, "Why don't you quit and get on
social security?" See, they don't have to foot that bill. They take that
out of your ticket. They'll get you on social security. You're
expendable, see. The machine is worth more than you are.