"HARBEL, Liberia — The end came with a letter, but Moses Tokpah couldn’t read it. Twenty-two years of fumes at the rubber factory had damaged his vision, he said, so a friend delivered the news: Firestone was laying him off.
'Due to the redundancy of your position,' the text said.
Tokpah, 53, felt dizzy that July morning. When the international tire powerhouse — Liberia’s largest private employer — announced plans last spring to slash its workforce, he prayed to survive the cuts. No one he knew could find work anymore.
'I just lost everything,' he said, tears welling.
As the price of rubber slips on the global market, Firestone — a company founded in Ohio with nine decades in this West African country — is shedding large swaths of its staff to cope with what it calls 'continued and unsustainable losses.'
The drawdown threatens to rip a seismic hole in Liberia’s floundering economy, analysts say, opening the latest chapter in the country’s long and complicated history with American-rooted power brokers.
'Firestone is the anchor,' said Gyude Moore, Liberia’s former public works minister. 'Like the auto industry was for Detroit — except for an entire country...'
