(p. A1) BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Ellen Gaugler remembers driving her father to the Bethlehem Steel mill, where he spent his working years hauling beams off the assembly line and onto rail cars.
When the Pennsylvania plant shut down about two decades ago, Ms. Gaugler thought it was the last time she or anyone in Bethlehem would come to its gates to find a job that paid a decent wage for a physical day of work.
But she saw an ad in the paper last year for a position at a local warehouse that changed her mind. She’d never heard of Zulily, the online retailer doing the hiring, but she knew the address: It was on the old mill site, steps from where her father worked.
“When I came for the interviews I looked up and said, ‘Oh, my God, I feel like I am at home,'” Ms. Gaugler said. She got the job.
As shopping has shifted from conventional stores to online marketplaces, many retail workers have been left in the cold, but Ms. Gaugler is coming out ahead. Sellers like Zulily, Amazon and Walmart are competing to get goods to the buyer’s doorstep as quickly as possible, giving rise to a constellation of vast warehouses that have fueled a boom for workers without college degrees and breathed new life into pockets of the country that had fallen economically behind.
For the full story, see:
NATALIE KITROEFF. ” Idle Steel Mills Rumble to Life As Online Sellers’ Warehouses.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 23, 2017): A1 & A13.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 22, 2017, and has the title “Where Internet Orders Mean Real Jobs, and New Life for Communities.”)