Source: Grist

Excerpt:

For nearly a century, a substantial portion of America’s iconic yellow school buses have been manufactured at a factory in Fort Valley, a town of 9,000 people surrounded by peach and pecan orchards in central Georgia.

Carolyn Allen has worked at Blue Bird for 13 years, and she talks about this fact almost as though it’s a surprise to her. “I live about 15 miles away and I never thought I’d be here,” she told Grist. “I never wanted to work here, because people were always being laid off all the time.” But life’s contingencies brought her to the company anyway: “I got to where I was looking for a job, and this is the one that came open.”

Even though she stayed, Allen wasn’t happy working at Blue Bird. “There was so many things in here that was not right. There was unfairness, favoritism, workload,” she said. “Lord, we worked sometimes six and seven days a week, and people needed to go home and see their families sometimes. And unfair wages.”

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