''I got nothing against the company, because it gave me a wife and a good-looking kid,'' Mr. Melendez said, referring to his son, Sal, 14. ''But right now they're not treating the people there -- good, decent people -- with dignity.'' He was especially bitter that even as the company laid off workers, it assigned others to work overtime. ''People are working their last days there, and they just keep pushing and pushing them like slaves,'' he said.

When Swingline closes completely, 450 jobs will be gone. That is the largest single job loss in New York City from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, the 1994 pact that lowered trade barriers among the United States, Mexico and Canada. Since 1994 about 800 workers from 17 companies in the city have registered with the Federal Department of Labor for unemployment and retraining benefits related to Nafta.

When officials from Swingline's parent company, Acco U.S.A., in Wheeling, Ill., announced that its Queens factory had become too costly to maintain and said the only way to increase profits was to move to Mexico, where labor and overhead are much cheaper, Mayor Giuliani declared that New York could do without a company that did not want to pay workers a decent wage. ''The city comes out of this quite well,'' he said, adding that new companies were sprouting up and expanding in Long Island City and that Swingline workers probably would not have trouble finding new jobs. At the time, the Mayor was running for re-election, and his critics called his comments about the Swingline workers' job prospects insensitive and overly optimistic. Today, as hundreds of those workers grapple with unemployment, many complain that the Mayor painted far too rosy a picture. They worry that few companies will hire middle-aged, unskilled factory workers, and that even if they find new jobs, working back up to their old pay, an average of $10 an hour, will be next to impossible.

''The only jobs they have at unemployment are for fast food and for a foot massager, and that's at $5.50 an hour,'' said Nancy DeWendt, 48, who started at Swingline some 20 years ago, attaching staplers to their bases. ''When you're used to a certain standard of living, that's like taking a gun and shooting me in my head.''

For Sal and Juana Melendez, losing just one of their two Swingline incomes has already seriously shaken the routine and order of their lives. While Juana Melendez, 41, who is recovering from a slipped disk, will soon return to school to study English as a second language, Mr. Melendez, 46, has begun sniffing around for another job. Despite more than a decade of management experience at Swingline's loading bays, he said, his prospects were not good.