Sound Advice
Just weeks before Christmas in 2002 John Taylor was asked into the General Manager’s Office at Lucasfilms, he was told that after 20 years they no longer needed him, they escorted him to his desk and told him he had an hour to clear out. “I felt oddly disconnected,” said the sound engineer. “It was very bleak.”
John attempted to take it to the courts, he approached his union shop steward, but the shop steward said he wouldn’t touch it. Taylor said this wasn’t the first time people over 50 got let go. He found out 12 others were fired around the same time as he. He tried to set up a class action suit, but he was told Lucas would not loose. The company offered him compensation and what it would have cost him for litigation fees. Desperate, he took it. “I felt very cheap and dirty accepting the money,” relayed John.
You can hear John talk about how hard it was to get out of the depression this created for him and what a burden this was for his entire family, including his then 10 year old son.
When this happens to you “you have no relation to the people in your past, when you are out, you are OUT,” Taylor recounted. But, what he found was that “with a new life comes new relationships,” which he sees as a plus.
John feels people he knows over 50 have a certain sense of pride. But what he is finding is as he is opening up and talking about his situation others are opening up to him. “We are all in this new thing together,” John believes.
Hear what he has to say about being more honest with each other. “We feel that when we loose our jobs, because of the work ethic we have, we feel we loose our identities. That is just not true,” said John.
