A Heartbreak
The shock and anger caused by the announcement of closures echoes the often dramatic effects of these decisions on staff and families. Each wave of redundancies is experienced as a heartbreak. It drops thousands of workers into uncertainty and insecurity. The industrial crisis makes finding a new job and career retraining difficult. Some people are particularly vulnerable: the least qualified, immigrants who are often forced to return to their country of origin, and women, whose work is seen as secondary. For towns such as Yverdon and Sainte-Croix, where the majority of jobs depend on industry, factory closures have had a profound effect on local life. For the first time since the late 1940s, the population declined. Yverdon lost 1,200 inhabitants between 1973 and 1978. While Sainte-Croix, which had almost 7,400 inhabitants in the early 1960s, faced massive depopulation and lost a third of its population between 1965 and 1980. Unemployment was rapidly increasing and the number of people working in the tertiary sector – trade, services and administration – outnumbered those working in industry.