Charleston Gazette-Mail – Jason Miller has six months left on the job he got 20 years ago. Read
Five others, two hourly employees and three supervisors, will continue to work with him at the Century Aluminum plant in Ravenswood. The plant was idled February 2009, when Century laid off more than 650 employees. Last week, Century officials announced the plant would not reopen — a move that many in the community expected, but one that still hit some of them hard.
“We knew it was coming,” Miller said. “We just didn’t know when. The company didn’t even tell us. We found out about it on the news and over the social media. Nobody from the company even came to talk to us.”
Miller, an electrician, makes sure no power line problems damage the large plant, opened by Kaiser Aluminum in 1957. He’ll do that for the next several months, and that’ll be it.
He’s also financial secretary and a former local president for the United Steelworkers of America Local 5668 in Ravenswood.
“MacDonald’s and Wal-Mart are not going to carry everybody. We have to get manufacturing jobs back,” Miller said. “The steel industry has done left. And right around the corner, it looks like aluminum will be gone.”
