Western North Carolina, manufacturing jobs lost
Listen up, lawmakers: WNC can't sustain this alarming job loss rate
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By Asheville Citizen-Times
May 25, 2003 11:52 p.m.
The news that Continental Teves is leaving Asheville and taking 350 jobs with it removes one more support from the manufacturing base that under girds our region's already wobbly economy and presents those area leaders who are trying to shore it up with a still bigger challenge.
Some of the Continental Teves jobs will be moved to plants in Fletcher and Culpepper, Va., but about 200 jobs will move to Mexico.
The Continental Teves announcement comes on the heels of news that the Bussmann Division of Cooper Industries in Black Mountain will be laying off 100 of its 400 employees beginning in August. And, according to Rick Elingburg, manager of the Buncombe County office of the N.C. Employment Security Commission, Micro Switch, a division of Honeywell, plans to eliminate 180 of its approximately 500 jobs in Mars Hill.
Taken together that's a loss of 630 manufacturing jobs in the past three months in Buncombe and Madison counties, which the Employment Security Commission place into one statistical area.
The two counties are far from being alone in the hemorrhaging of their manufacturing base. One of Broyhill Furniture's Rutherfordton plants is scheduled to close at the end of June, eliminating more than 500 jobs. And that follows a loss of 150 jobs at Mastercraft Fabrics in March and 65 jobs at Stonecutter in January. This is in a county that had an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent in March.
By comparison, Buncombe County's unemployment rate was 3.8 percent in March, good when you compare it to the national unemployment rate of 6 percent, an eight-year high. But it belies what's happening to manufacturing, the foundation of the county's, the state's and the nation's wealth.
Between January 2001 and March 2003, the number of manufacturing jobs in Buncombe and Madison counties decreased from 17,700 to 14,500 -- a loss of 2,200 jobs, according to ESC figures. That doesn't include the 630 mentioned above.
During the same period, the number of jobs in the service sector -- which includes everything from high-paying jobs in finance, health care, information services, education, finance and transportation to lower paying jobs in retail, food service and hospitality -- increased by 1,200, from 87,700 to 88,900.
But most of that growth has been in the low-end jobs in retail, food service and hospitality, according to Elingburg. And those jobs pay an average of only $8 an hour, compared with an average wage of $12.85 an hour in manufacturing, not including benefits. And in most cases, they don't provide nearly the benefits that manufacturing jobs do.
Local education and economic development leaders are working hard to move the area toward a knowledge-based economy with jobs that are less likely to be removed to other countries where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in the United States. Efforts to incubate and attract bio-tech and other high-tech businesses, to provide educational opportunities for those who have lost their jobs, to increase the economic impact of agri-tourism and the arts and crafts industry are all part of the answer for our region.
But as these alarming job losses make clear, there are market forces operating that are beyond the control of local or even state leaders. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) and other trade agreements are having enormous and devastating consequences for American workers.
"Jobs are going to continue going away if we don't make some major changes to the legislation," says ESC's Elingburg.
Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., has proposed a plan to try to stem the loss of jobs. Among other things, he advocated writing into law a requirement that U.S. trading partners provide open, equitable and reciprocal market access. In a global marketplace, American industries and American workers are already at a huge disadvantage because of cheaper labor and far more lax regulations in many countries. It is grossly unfair when American workers must also overcome agreements with trading partners that allow cheaper foreign products to flood American markets, but restrict the influx of American products into partner-countries' markets.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's international deficit in goods and services increased from $40.4 billion in February to $43.5 billion in March as imports increased more than exports.
It should be obvious that neither the rate of job loss, nor the trade deficit, is sustainable.
What we don't make, we have to import. Maybe we're missing something here, but sitting in Western North Carolina and watching jobs evaporate, the picture is getting progressively more alarming.
Yet, if the things our nation's lawmakers seem to be paying attention to are any indication, they are blissfully unaware that our economic foundations are developing some very scary cracks. Maybe it's time we began sounding the alarm. |
