All those "Fat Cat" Union manufacturing jobs are gone, guys. We are going to end up losing our entire Auto industry if the Auto Unions keep it up. Combined with the people running the companies who don't love and know how to sell autos.
Appalachia struggles as jobs just disappear
03/22/04
Bill Sloat
Plain Dealer Reporter
New Lexington- The sun was sliding toward dusk on a gloomy New Year's Eve when Scott Poling glanced at his wristwatch and caught the hour: 4 p.m.
He was chatting with a car salesman whose lot was filled with shiny new SUVs. A few blocks down the street was an old automobile axle factory that paid the highest wages in town.
"Well," Poling remembers saying, "there's 103 people that the bank won't give a loan to anymore."
Time had just run out for the factory, which shut its doors after nearly a century.
Four o'clock on Dec. 31, 2003, was a tough moment in a small place. It sent the jobless rate a notch higher and cast a doleful shadow across the weary towns and the dun valleys in Ohio's hill country.
In Appalachia, where the villages often started as huddles of homes near coal seams in the midst of Ohio's hills, eight counties are among the state's top 10 for unemployment.
The state's most current jobless breakdown by county is for January. It shows five counties with more than twice Ohio's 7 percent average.
More than one of every four people in Morgan County is jobless.
If Wall Street means Big Money, Boston Old Money and Silicon Valley New Money, then the hill country is Hungry for Money - a place where hard times come first and stay longer.
The boom of the 1990s is only the faintest echo in these vast and emptying hills. The families who remained must struggle against currents of economic change.
Poling, 46, knows all too well what it's like to swim in those currents.
Alongside his mother and sister, he worked in a factory that made air- conditioners.
It closed.
He worked for an insurance agency. It downsized and laid him off.
Now he works four hours a day doing administrative chores for the Perry County Chamber of Commerce. Thoughts about starting over in Florida churn through his mind.
No. 1 mission:
'Stop the bleeding'
New Lexington, with its courthouse, some banks and a few shops lining Main Street, is a small town struggling against decline.
Perry County was ground zero in the landmark school funding lawsuit, DeRolph vs. the State of Ohio, which forced a 12-year, $23 billion plan to rebuild and renovate the state's schools.
Nathan DeRolph was a Perry County student whose school was so poor it had no desk for him to use while taking a test.
The schools got better, but the coal mines disappeared. In 1982, there were 1,038 coal miners in Perry County. Today, there are fewer than 200. The mines used to have the biggest payrolls in the county. Now, the nursing homes and welfare agencies pay their workers $33 million a year more than the mines.
Factories, which paid wages nearly as fat as those in the mines, are rapidly fading, too. The new economy is like a wrecking ball slamming into everything.
"What we need now is an economy that supports a middle class," said Larry Rentschler, superintendent of New Lexington schools.
Rentschler, once superintendent at Berkshire schools in Geauga County, is an educator in an unusual role: He dabbles in economic development issues as head of the local chamber of commerce. He became a business booster because he's worried that graduates will have no future unless they move away.
"The mission is do something to stop the bleeding. These are people who are saying, 'Give me a job, and I'll give you a damn good day's work for a reasonable day's pay.' But who out there is listening to them?"
Malta Mayor Philip Bankhurst can quickly tick off the losses in his town in Morgan County: A mine, a window-maker and a ball-bearing plant all closed in the last three years, taking nearly 900 jobs.
Morgan County, with about 15,000 residents, is one of the most sparsely settled in Ohio. It has no four-lane highways. The state estimates more than 20 percent of the people are unemployed.
"I've seen ups and downs, but I never remember it ever being this bad," Bankhurst said. "We even had to disband the Police Department. I don't know if we've hit bottom, but if we aren't there yet, we can't have too far left to go."
Plenty of blame
to go around
When calamity came, nobody was sure how to fend it off or certain why it happened.
Communities that put their energies into producing car parts, furniture, machine tools, doors, windows, furnace filters and other goods discovered that the currents of the economy had abruptly switched course.
Some complain that the outside world is exerting power against them through forces such as NAFTA and GATT, global capital and the World Bank, and a whole host of the planet's economic interconnections. There is even more antagonism aimed at environmental rules blamed for smothering the coal mines.
"A few years ago, people would have probably said times were getting better," says Jeff Doose, associate management director of the Appalachian Regional Entrepreneurship Initiative at Ohio University in Athens. "Now people are saying we're losing what we've got, and we can't seem to attract anything new."
Until 4 p.m. on New Year's Eve, Paul Doughty was a foreman at Lempco Industries in New Lexington.
Lempco started making automobile axles in Cleveland's Flats when World War I broke out. At one time, it was based in Maple Heights and had 3,000 workers in five plants. By the afternoon that it ceased operations, Lempco had shrunk to the single factory in New Lexington.
At age 52, Doughty now works part time as a flagman for the Ohio Department of Transportation.
"They'll give me 1,000 hours. It should last until August or September," Doughty says. "After that, who knows?"
Doughty joined Lempco in 1972. Its decline was so gradual that workers lulled themselves into not seeing the end coming until it was too late, he said.
"You'd hear that it was foreign competition. The last three or four years, the plant was limping along. They were losing money, and you just can't survive losing money year after year after year," Doughty says.
"Now I can't even guess what will happen to me. Really, the world I knew is gone."
Jeff Strnad's grandfather, James, founded Lempco as a machine shop in 1917 in a 30-by-40-foot room in the Flats. James, the son of Czech immigrants, was 14 when he started at the old Peerless Motor Car Co. as an apprentice toolmaker making 10 cents an hour. He quit school in the eighth grade. Ten years later, he had saved $600 and started the company.
Then, when industry flourished and entrepreneurial energy built fortunes, Ohio seemed like the Promised Land.
"In his day it was Ohio," says Strnad, an economist and law professor at Stanford University in California and the president of the family-owned company when it ceased operations. "Next it was Korea and Japan, and now China, where the manufacturing costs are so low."
Searching for ideas
and new markets
The average Lempco employee was 54 years old and worked in the plant about 30 years, said Ron Glass, who headed the United Steelworkers of America there. State officials are trying to line up job retraining programs, but Glass wonders if there is any point.
When the mines started closing, state officials rushed to set up classes that instructed freshly unemployed miners how to reinvent themselves as air-conditioning and heating repairmen, Glass remembered.
"But when it was all done, there weren't that many jobs in it," Glass said. "I think re-education for new job skills is important, but I'm not sure the government really knows what skills will be in demand. And what good is job training if there aren't any jobs around? You look around New Lexington, and do you see very many people producing things the world wants these days?"
Twenty miles down the highway is someone who is doing just that.
Craig Cornett started a cannery in 1994 in the depressed coal-mining community of Glouster and found his niche. His Frog Ranch brand now is stocked on Kroger and Giant Eagle shelves across the nation. By May, Frog Ranch salsa will be in hundreds of Sam's Club stores operated by Wal-Mart. He expects to sell nearly $1 million worth of salsa and pickled peppers this year.
Cornett said he went into business for himself because he found there was little opportunity to make a living wage in Perry County, a place he fell in love with. He had a few jobs washing dishes and waiting tables in restaurants, then tried drywalling. He couldn't go back to the family farm in Preble County west of Dayton because it was crushed by debt.
He started pickling peppers using a family recipe from his Hungarian grandmother. He made about $1,500 the first year.
Cornett buys his tomatoes in Ohio.
He buys his peppers in Ohio.
The labels on his jars come from Athens, where a local artist designs them. His product is packed in Mason canning jars that customers can reuse. His crates are made from Ohio buckeye trees, and they can double as CD holders.
"This area is not dead yet, but it's on life support," Cornett says. "People need to start coming up with ideas to help themselves. Who else is going to do it? The mines are gone, and General Motors ain't moving here." |
