Oregon Public Broadcasting

Freightliner trucks have been built in Portland since the 1930's. But for the last 20 years - as manufacturing increasingly moved overseas -- the future of the Portland factory has been uncertain.

Earlier this year Daimler, which bought Freightliner in 1981, said it was about to close the factory for good.

Then, as part of a contract to build vehicles for the U.S. military, Daimler announced the factory would stay open.
Daimler is about to start negotiations with the machinists  union later this month. 

Kristian Foden-Vencil talked to members of that union to find out what it's like to live with so much uncertainty.

Riller Clegg and Tad Wagner are longtime Machinists Union members. They say not knowing  how long your job will last is difficult.

Tad Wagner: "You never really know. It's just over your head. Enjoy it while it's here, try to plan for when it's not."

Riller Clegg

Riller Clegg: "It's very frustrating, it makes you nervous, stressful."

Riller Clegg's is home making dinner, after finishing an eight-hour shift on the assembly line.

Riller Clegg: "I'm fixing to bake some chicken for lunch tomorrow and dinner this afternoon."

Kristian Foden-Vencil: "And how are you going to prepare it then?"

Riller Clegg: "I'm going to take it, put it in the skillet with some onions and bell pepper and season it up really good and put in the oven. And while it's cooking, I'm going to lay-down and hopefully get me a nap."

She's been at the Daimler factory for 17 years. She screws steering wheels onto the trucks. And while she makes $23-an-hour, she's never really thought of it as a secure, long-term job.

Riller Clegg: "You know when you first start working at Frieghtliner, you often hear this rumor. Frieghtliner is closing, Frieghtliner is closing. And so you always keep that in the back of your mind. And then you make it through another year and they're still open."

That uncertainty means Clegg never bought her own home. She just didn't know if she'd be making enough money to pay a mortgage.

She says nothing in life is certain, and she doesn't have any suggestions for how Daimler might run the plant differently. But she says, it's stressful.

Riller Clegg: "Because so many people have sold their homes, gotten divorces, gotten out of their homes, moved into apartments.. A lot of people have sold their boats, sold their trucks, they've downsized to smaller vehicles. They've done whatever they can to stay afloat. And then come back and tell you, the plant is going to come back and open for three more years.  And then you're wondering what did I do all this for? Why couldn't they have told me earlier. It's just devastating."

After the dot-com bubble burst,  Daimler laid Clegg off for two years. Under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, she received free retraining and even got a degree in Criminal Justice.

Riller Clegg: "But you have to start from the bottom, and I'm getting too old to start from the bottom so I decided to go back to Freightliner, like a lot of other people did. No job staring off is going to pay you $23-$24 an hour. But I would have been willing to work for $15 or $16 to try and stay afloat. But no job's going to start you off at $15 either. Most jobs tops off at $15."

For a while, Clegg says, she thought she'd done the right thing. But when the company announced it would be closing the factory, she started to wonder.

Riller Clegg: "I often think about the things you should have done that you didn't do. And then it's too late and you're like 'Oh My God.' You're never supposed to give up, don't get me wrong. But then you get to thinking, nobody's going to hire you in your late 40's early 50's. So what do you do? You be thinking, maybe I should have taken advantage of my criminal justice degree. And then you're like, you can't just dwell on that, you have to move on."

So she's planning to stay at Daimler, at least as long as the new military contract lasts. Then who knows.

Outside the Daimler factory, a half dozen lunch trucks wait for the day shift to go on a break.

Tad Wagner bolts truck cabs onto the chassies here. He decided 11 years ago that despite the uncertainty, he'd buy a house.

Tad Wagner: "You can't be afraid of living and you need to have a positive attitude and a positive direction otherwise you won't ever do anything. You won't ever risk anything and your life will be stagnant."

Like Clegg, Wagner was also laid-off in 2000, and then lured back to the factory.

Tad Wagner: "I did go through the NAFTA program and got a degree in automotive service technology. And was working for a shop for about three or four months, and that was when they called me back. And I think if I had been 15 years younger, I don't  think I would have come back. It's harder to turn down the pay and benefits, especially in this stage of our lives, where to venture out and do something totally new is difficult and a little bit scary."

Long-term, Wagner says he'd either like to go back to school and get into teaching or move up the ladder and stay with Daimler -- perhaps in a white-collar position.

The company hasn't said  how long it plans to keep the factory running this time, but union negotiations are about to start -- and one of the first things to decide will be whether the contract should run the usual three years.