"I saw what was happening to this economy, but it didn't really hit me until it happened to me," said Moss, a lifelong Republican who is not only voting for the Democrats but also volunteering at the Wilkes-Barre headquarters of the Kerry-Edwards campaign. On Friday, Moss introduced Edwards at a rally in Scranton.
"I've come a long way from voting Republican for president every time," said Moss, a single mother of a 7-year-old daughter. Last year, she learned she had breast cancer. If she loses her health insurance, she will have to pay $600 every three months for the drugs she needs to keep healing.
Of the six people seated at Ziminsky's table the other day, five are registered Democrats, though several, such as Beretsky, said they voted for the candidate more often than the party. This time, they are voting against a candidate -- the president.
"I've voted for Republicans," Beretsky said. But Bush, he said, "failed the average American. He just favors the rich, the more affluent people. I want to choose someone who I feel has my interests in mind, my survival in mind, until I take the big dirt nap."
Ziminsky said she is also voting against Bush. "I'm not particularly fond of John Kerry," she said. "I like Edwards. And I don't know why I'm not fond of John Kerry. But to me, Bush is anti-union. This country was founded on unions."
The Pennsylvania Bush-Cheney campaign insists that Bush has a shot at the small towns and counties in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton region, if not the cities. "The reason for that is we're heavily up on absentee ballots," said Stuart Bailey, a Lackawanna County Republican Committee member.
As for the area's job losses, Bailey said many people, including himself, have lost jobs but do not blame the president. "We lost a 98-year-old furniture manufacturing business last year in part because of foreign implications," said Bailey, 70. "I not only lost my business, I lost my pension. You can't blame Bush for that. I think it's far more deep than that."
But it would be hard to overstate how devastating the closing of Techneglas is proving to be for former employees, and how bitter that has made them toward a president whose administration has said that outsourcing "makes sense."
Many of the people at Techneglas had worked there for at least 15 years. The shifts and hours were brutal -- 12-hour days, often seven days a week -- but to say you were with Techneglas was to suggest an enviable, comfortable way of life. Even now, the cost of living in Wilkes-Barre is low. A three-bedroom, two-bath house in a good neighborhood costs about $100,000, translating into a manageable mortgage payment for Techneglas workers.
Beretsky, a plant mechanic, recalled how co-workers responded when his wife's cancer was diagnosed 10 years ago. For the 11 months before she died, he said, his bosses told him he could leave work whenever he wanted, co-workers regularly asked how they could help, and one supervisor offered to help rear his daughter, who was then 10. "I worked with a tremendous amount of wonderful people," he said.
Beretsky was one of the last to leave. "My last day was August 29th," he said. "It was depressing, like watching the death of a person I've known and loved for a long time. The plant was empty. The furnaces were shutting down. It was odd not having the heat of the furnace that I had felt for 35 years." He has no idea what he will do next.
Moss, who started working at Techneglas when she was 22, says virtually all her friends are people she met at the plant. "We grew up together," said Moss, who worked as a lab technician, testing chemical formulas to make the glass.
She is one of the luckier ones -- one of nine former employees given part-time, six-month jobs at the Wilkes-Barre office of the state unemployment agency. The jobs, created by a grant authorized by Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D), will track Techneglas employees to help them find jobs or train for a new line of work.
Ziminsky, 61, had planned to retire next year. But with her company pension in doubt -- Techneglas has said it does not have the money to pay employees the pensions they are due -- she says she may never retire. She plans to take advantage of job training offered to Techneglas workers, doing medical data entry.
She realizes she is not the ideal new job candidate. There is her age. And her health. She sleeps no more than two or three hours a night because of a herniated disc in her neck, and she is concerned about how she is going to pay for the medications she takes for breast cancer.
Ziminsky said that with her mortgage nearly paid off, she tries not to worry about the rest. She devotes some of her time volunteering with the Kerry campaign in Wilkes-Barre. But she is weary of the relentless ads from both sides that she sees every night on the local news. "This election shouldn't be 'Vote Democrat' or 'Vote Republican,' " she said. "It should be about what's best for America."
