He lost his job on the GM assembly line. The second career he found placed him at the center of a debate about what it means to be a man in today’s economy.
, flagging marriage rates and absentee fathers, is prompting cries of “crisis” from academia and Capitol Hill, most famously inspiring Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley to write a whole book on the subject. InHawley advocates a return to what he calls traditionally masculine values grounded in the Bible, with the man in the role of leader and provider, guarding his family Eden against chaos .
It was work, in fact, that had brought Cromer’s family to southwest Ohio in the first place. Cromer’s dad, Sherman, grew up on a farm in Hazel Patch, Ky., the youngest of nine children. Sherman Cromer later told his own kids how, with every seed he planted in the corn fields, he was plotting his escape.
Cromer is proud of his 16 years working at the GM plant, and he keeps many mementos of his time there, including a framed photo of the plant , the certificate of recognition he received after 10 years working there and a copy of the weekly newsletter published by workers at the plant . In any case, the market didn’t have time for traditional attitudes about manliness. “There were no jobs,” Cromer recalled recently. “It was really scary.”
Clinical rotations during school were hard to get used to, especially when caring for people who were incontinent or otherwise unable to tend to their own hygiene. During one rotation, an elderly woman refused to let him bathe her; Cromer told the instructor this had hurt his feelings but was secretly relieved. He got his certification as a licensed practical nurse in 2010, a bit less than two years after his layoff, which qualified him to work in long-term care and little else.
He definitely wasn’t. Still, at the same time that he was getting his life back together, many others were not. The economy had by then, in 2014, recovered from the depths of the 2008 recession, but many of the manufacturing job losses were permanent, and some of Cromer’s laid-off colleagues had taken their chances waiting for transfer offers to other GM plants that never came. Cromer, meanwhile, was doing some of the most challenging work of his life.
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