In Canton, Ohio when they didn't need us in the steel mills any longer, we were "Laid Off".
In Sheffield, we were the victims of "Redundancy".
Which sounds more harsh? "Laid Off" somehow sounds a little softer to me. "Redundancy" sounds more personal, more final. "You are redundant." Sounds like the end of ones working life, or life, period. "Laid Off" somehow has the glimmer of hope that one could actually be brought back to the job when times get better. It's as if it is only temporary.
My father worked in a steel mill in Canton, Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. I remember him being laid off temporarily and then brought back to the same job a few weeks later. Perhaps that is why I didn't see it as something final. There was just a temporary slow down in the industry. Maybe people were not buying so many cars that year or something. He left before the bottom eventually fell out of the steel industry in Ohio, in the USA. He left before those laid off were not brought back again. This, the final lay off, was probably about the same time as the time-set of the recent The Afternoon Play production of Frances Byrnes's play Man of Steel.
Man of Steel, as the BBC Radio 4 The Afternoon Play page description reads, is,
"Set in Sheffield in 1982, the drama is based on the author’s own experience and that of her father and many of his friends as their lives are wrecked by redundancy." The play is the view of the teenaged daughter as she sees her father struggle as his life's labor is taken from him. It is a job he needs to help sustain the family and, maybe most importantly to the emotional environment of the story, his self esteem within it. Byrnes also pulls out wider to show the situation politically and culturally of the time setting. Producer/Director Kate McAll uses pop tunes of the day to provide a sense of atmosphere. This is done in BBC Radio 4 productions so much that it is perhaps wearisome at times. The play felt a little too short with a very strange ending that serves to demonstrate how cold the culture can be to the ones made redundant.
It is a good clear picture of what happens to the workers and their families when an industry has moved on.
