Living the Boom and Bust Cycle: Update on Houston

Literacy struggles came to a head in Houston last month as employees from our second largest mill learned that Houston Forest Products will cease Houston operations in late May, 2014.  For some of the millworkers, to say “this changes everything” would be an understatement.   Consider this scenario: It is 1983 and you are a 16 year old, with Grade 10. You hear that you can work at the local mill for great money. You get the job and the big cheques come in. Then the car, the house, the wife and kids, and the payments. Now you are pretty much committed to this job and the lifestyle it provides.    Thirty years fly by. All the employees are notified of the mill closure in five months. You are now 46 and feel you have no skills and no credentials. You still have a house, a wife, kids and lots of bills that are your responsibility. Maybe not a lot in the bank—retirement is still 19 long years away. Suddenly, your job is no longer provides the stable future you used to rely on.    As an ex-worker you face many choices and challenges over the next few months. If you have low literacy skills you will find yourself particularly challenged. Not only are the choices tough, stay for the severance pay or quit now and find another job, apply for EI now or later, and to top it off you find out that the powers-that-be are still in the “wait and see how it all plays out” stage for some of the important information. (In the literacy world, we would call this a classic Level 5 Essential Skills Critical Thinking exercise. And yes, Level 5 is the highest level; the one we save for astronauts and rocket scientists.) This situation throws you into a stressful critical thinking exercise—and on top of that, there is the added stress that your life depends on you and your family’s decisions.    Houston Link to Learning has stepped in to assist Northwest Community College as they work to capacity assisting the displaced workforce with resume writing and learning plans. Both the Career and College Prep Coordinator and the Adult Literacy Coordinator have a steady stream of workers in their offices.  Resume writing is high demand, Houston Link to Learning began offering the service one day per week and now is up to two days, with other practitioners ready for the overflow.   How to articulate the workers’ skills, how to work with the folks in a respectful manner, how to stay hopeful in the face of despair, how to ask the right questions on the right day to figure out the workers’ future needs, are all skills that we, as literacy practitioners, are working hard to master.     To me, the current Houston condition is the sad reality of the resource industry. The ups and the downs, as you folks in Kitimat and Terrace know only too well. (I could keep adding towns to this—this is our shared regional reality—boom and bust.)   As Regional Literacy Coordinator, I will keep track and share our regional realties as we work through this current boom and bust of resource development. Please send me your “literacy lens” community updates of how the boom or bust is affecting you and your community. Or is your community immune? (For example, I have no idea what is happening in these terms in Haida Gwaii.)   I welcome submissions from anyone with the literacy lens, practitioners, learners, workers. Please send your thoughts to:  dmcrae@nwcc.bc.ca    I will be sharing these as they come in.