I was late to the meeting, so I wasn’t there when they destroyed everyone’s lives. I only got to see the aftermath.

On the previous Sunday, flyers distributed around the cafeteria announced a meeting at the Danbury Sheraton. All employees of Watson Pharmaceuticals, from all three plants in Brewster, Carmel, and Danbury, were told to attend.

Those who were working at the time would be paid; those who had that day off would get overtime. And those who were working that night, like me, and should be sleeping at 1:00 in the afternoon, would get a paid night off. The very generosity of the whole thing was scaring everyone. If they were paying us, the news must be really bad.

For months, talk of shift changes had been flying around. If the buzz was to be believed, we would be cutting back from four 12-hour shifts to three 8-hour ones. And shift changes meant layoffs. Tom Strohl, the general manager for all three plants, had accidentally let that one slip, and there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. We weren’t geniuses, but we could do math. A shift change meant that a quarter of the people in manufacturing would have to go. Their jobs would probably be sent out to the plant in Goa, India that Watson reps bragged about in the presentation they gave when I first applied for the job.

I thought back to the day I interviewed, just over a year earlier. The hiring blitz, they called it. They were talking to dozens of people every day. Now most of those people would have to look for other jobs.

I started at Watson at a crossroads in my life. I was lost and broke and had no health insurance. Watson offered great coverage. They needed to because their staff turnover was so high.

And the turnover was high because it’s a lousy job. It wasn’t the worst job on the planet. We weren’t smelting manhole covers in Calcutta. But people didn’t work there because they had a lot of options. I remember making a snarky remark in my early days there that the building had more mullets than Master’s degrees.

The manufacturing shifts were 12 hours, 6:00 to 6:30, Sunday through Tuesday or Thursday through Saturday and alternating Wednesdays. This allowed people to work overtime on the off days or have another job. The pay was such that more than a few also worked at Wal-Mart or waited tables at Cracker Barrel.

They were all required to be at this meeting, but so were lab people, which was strange because only the manufacturing areas should be affected by the rumored shift changes. What was up?

I woke up late that Tuesday afternoon. My ride had left, so I called a cab to get to Danbury. As I entered the hotel, I pulled on the string attached to my belt loop and the badge ripped off, which I figured was some sort of an omen.

When I got to the conference room, it was deathly silent, as if no one—let alone several hundred people—was in the audience. I didn’t recognize the man speaking, but I was pretty sure it was Paul Bisaro, the company president.

Tom Strohl had dropped the guillotine before I got there. This meeting was not about shift changes. All employees would be laid off, phased out by 2010. And the wealthiest man in the room, the one person guaranteed a job in 2011, was standing at the podium, calmly explaining that the layoffs were not because the company was losing money. It wasn’t that they were going under. They could just make more money by shipping the work out to India. Tom knew it was bogus when he told us last summer that they were not going to sell us out. Back then, the last thing they needed was people quitting.

When the suit left the podium, no one reacted. No applause. No boos. Nothing. After 30 seconds, one wiseass started clapping, and a few people around him, those that weren’t quietly weeping, started to laugh. Strohl got back up and started telling us the rest of the itinerary. We would be dismissed to different rooms to get packets of information, which would tell us about severance and retention packages. He would not be taking questions.

In the meantime, he needed us to be respectful. He had noticed some disrespect for the previous speakers, and it disappointed him. Most of the room was doing mental math about mortgages and kids’ tuition, and he was worried about manners. If this had been a union shop, he would have been more concerned about walking out with his head.

Paulie, a mechanic from the Packaging B2 shift, yelled out, “How the f–k can we trust anything you say right now?” Strohl paused and said, “We’re not taking questions.” Everyone laughed. Paulie was escorted out.

Walking from the auditorium to the rooms upstairs, I remember the soft lighting and pristine décor. There was little to distinguish the place from a funeral parlor, even without the throng of people openly sobbing. Only this wasn’t a gathering to pay respects to your great-uncle; this looked like a teenager had been killed in a drunk-driving accident.

In the hotel rooms upstairs, supervisors and managers were handing out the packets. Each room had a table with boxes of tissues laid out. Our severance packages, I thought.

I looked around at my colleagues. I had decided to quit before the meeting; I was going back to college. But there was a 45-year-old Lebanese woman, who had been on the job since she was 18. What was she supposed to do? There was a guy from my department, clearly burnt out from alcohol abuse in his youth. He doesn’t drive and has a kid to feed. Where’s he going to find work that pays this well as this?

The answer is he won’t. She won’t. They won’t. The new economy is rushing by the working man in this country, and I was watching the sad aftermath, like a car wreck on the highway. Six hundred more people are about to flood the job market, driving down wages. How many will be out of work in three years? Or working jobs that pay half of what they make now? Or dead?

I know that Paul Bisaro hasn’t asked himself these questions. If he had, he would probably need the same sleep medication that came off the line in Carmel—made diligently and safely by his employees. But not cheaply. And after all, isn’t that what really matters?
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Tom Cairney worked in the packaging department at the Watson Pharmaceuticals plant in Carmel, N.Y. for 13 months. He is currently a graduate student at Manhattanville College, with plans to teach social studies in New York City.