Posted on 08/02/2004 5:34:00 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
LEWISTOWN - Miranda Frymyer waits in front of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center for the shuttle bus to drive her to boot camp. She seems neither happy nor sad, but resigned.
The 18-year-old, sporting a blue Grateful Dead teddy bear tattoo on her chest, is surrounded by her mother, her stepmother, her father, her sister, her boyfriend and several family friends, none of whom want her to join the Army.
"We're having this war," her mother, Lisa Courtney, says. "I do not want my daughter going. I'm here to cry."
For Frymyer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem like a better option than the losing battle for decent jobs in Lewistown, where the population is falling, unemployment is among the highest in the state, and heroin is the escapist drug of choice among some of her peers.
"I want to make something out of my life," Frymyer says, crossing her arms. "There's nothing here."
On that, her mother agrees.
"I don't want her to be like me. I was a mom at 16, and I'm in a dead-end job," Courtney says, wearing a white T-shirt that carries the warning, "Staring won't make me like you more."
Even dead-end jobs are scarce in Lewistown, despite the fact fewer people are sticking around to apply for them.
Over four decades, the population in the borough -- the Mifflin County seat -- has slipped 29 percent, to 8,998 in 2000, from 12,640 in 1960. Mifflin County's unemployment rate jumped from an annual average of 4.5 percent in 2000 to 7.5 percent in 2003 and is hovering at more than 8 percent this year, well above the 3.5 percent rate in the Harrisburg region and the state average of 6.1 percent.
A series of plant closings over six months -- some due to the transfer of jobs to other countries -- has made a bad situation worse.
Series of closings:
Depending on who is talking, outsourcing is either a natural part of free trade in a global economy or a new way of describing the "great sucking sound" of U.S. jobs going abroad, as Ross Perot warned during his presidential bid in 1992. If Perot needs a vacant building from which to say "I told you so," Lewistown has plenty.
In February, Lear Corp. shut its Lewistown plant, which made automotive carpeting, leaving 308 employees out of work. Lear, which operates plants in 34 countries, transferred the work that was done at Lewistown to other places, primarily Canada. The company gave some of its employees the option of working at other Lear facilities, including plants in Carlisle and Virginia, but there were few takers.
The same month, Standard Steel, founded in 1795 and instrumental to the railroad industry in the 1800s, closed its ring mill, where locomotive wheels were made. One of 49 U.S. steel companies that have declared bankruptcy since 1997, Standard Steel struggles with overseas competition, and while it continues to operate in the Lewistown area, 109 workers lost their jobs at the ring mill.
Mann Edge Tool Co., an ax-and-hammer factory that opened in the late 1800s and employed as many as 350 people 20 years ago, closed its Water Street plant in September, idling the remaining 49 workers. Before the closing, the business was purchased by Delaware-based Collins Tool Co., a subsidiary of Truper Herramientas in Mexico.
Collins Tool continues to operate in the Mifflin County Industrial Development Corp. plaza, but the work once done at the ax forge plant on Water Street is done overseas.
Last November, Guardian Industries, a glass manufacturer, closed its Lewistown plant, laid off 69 workers and sent the jobs to Mexico.
No help nearby:
Neighboring counties offer little respite for Lewistown residents.
Six plants in Centre County and one in Huntingdon County closed during the past year, because of either foreign competition or the outsourcing of jobs to other countries, says Cynthia Spencer, counselor at Lewistown CareerLink. She says another plant in Lewistown may downsize this summer, when some of the 200 jobs will be sent to India.
Twice a week, a dozen Lewistown residents, many of whom worked at Lear and Mann Edge, drive an hour to Harrisburg to take taxpayer-financed retraining courses at Harrisburg Area Community College. There, they are learning how to repair heating and air-conditioning systems.
The courses and extended unemployment compensation are part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits that the displaced workers receive from the state Department of Labor and Industry and the U.S. Department of Labor.
The benefits, awarded to workers who lose their jobs as a result of outsourcing and international trade, do little to mask the damage to this once-thriving manufacturing town.
"Lewistown is decimated," says Bill Thompson, an instructor at HACC's Harrisburg campus. "Businesses are shutting down or cutting back."
Making ends meet:
When not commuting and learning, the students -- mostly middle-age white men with families to support -- try to make ends meet by painting houses, fixing cars, cutting grass and doing other odd jobs, Thompson says.
And on the rare occasion when full-time jobs open, a feeding frenzy ensues. At a recent daylong job fair at Trinity Packaging in Lewistown, more than 120 people showed up on a 90-degree weekday to apply for 35 jobs.
"We had to start turning people away at 5:30, so I'm sure there would have been more," says Lisa Woodruff, human resources manager at Trinity, where workers stuff plastic bags into boxes. "Our job fairs usually attract 50 to 60 [applicants], tops."
One applicant, Austin Shank, 19, went to the job fair because he's tired of working at Dairy Queen near his home in Reedsville. Of the eight children in the Shank family, three work for the ice cream chain, says Austin's mother, Martha Shank, as she sits on Trinity's front lawn and watches her son fill out his application.
"I have another son who's been looking for a job for two years, and he has a master's degree," Martha Shank says. "The jobs he's looking for ain't here. He's thinking of going into the Navy."
Austin is thinking of someplace other than Lewistown.
"If I can get a good enough job somewhere, I'll leave," he says.
Many people who get jobs at Trinity don't stay long, says Eric Goss, 28, who has worked at the plant for five years.
"A lot of people don't last more than a couple of hours," Goss says during a break. "Most don't last more than a week. It's noisy, and it's 20 degrees hotter than it is outside. With 100 percent humidity."
Goss says he has little choice but to weather the conditions. He's paid at top scale, $12.13 an hour, or $25,200 a year.
"Ain't too bad," Goss says. "Can't find anything else."
That's essentially the same reason Nicholas Seaholtz, 26, is filling out his application in his parked car. He drove to the job fair with his girlfriend, Ashley Druckemiller, 18, from their nearby hometown of Milroy. They left their infant son, Cole, in the care of his grandparents.
"I'll take whatever I can get, really," Seaholtz says. "It really doesn't matter as long as I can get a job."
Seaholtz says he has applied at 15 places since December, when he lost his job as a heavy-equipment operator.
"I think it's about time to move out of this state," he says. "Go out West. Down South. That's what it's coming to."
Rob Postal, president of the Mifflin County Industrial Development Corp., shares Seaholtz's frustration.
"I can understand the long-term benefit of outsourcing," Postal says. "But we don't have an adjustment for the short-term problems that are occurring. I understand that cheaper labor helps companies, but short-term, we're hurting."
Unlike other parts of Pennsylvania, including Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, "we don't have the service and government jobs to pick up the slack from the manufacturing losses," Postal says. "We're not replacing these jobs lost in manufacturing with other jobs. Those jobs that do come, the wages are not going to be the same."
Feeling the pain:
Other businesses in town are experiencing the trickle-down effect of outsourcing, consolidation and downsizing.
Revenue at Lewistown Florist is down 20 percent from a year ago, owner Mark Lawson says. He describes the current economic slump as the worst he's seen in the 24 years he has run the store.
"It's a lack of jobs," Lawson says. "People have no money to spend, and it's not getting better. Everybody feels it."
The opening of a Wal-Mart just outside Lewistown a decade ago didn't help matters, Lawson says, because it "also took business away" from downtown merchants.
"We're getting by," Lawson says while standing behind the counter of his shop, where he's surrounded by colorful flower arrangements and a caged bird but no customers. "Hopefully, something will turn around here."
Business is only slightly better at Henry's Subs & Suds, where two patrons sip beers in the otherwise empty bar.
"It's been like this for a while now," bartender Denise Fultz says. "Every week it gets worse. There's nothing in this town, and the people who are here don't have money."
Every once in awhile, road-construction crews who live outside of Lewistown stop in for beers after working on the highway widening project at routes 322 and 22.
Those workers brighten the atmosphere, Fultz says. "They come in, carry on and talk about sex."
When local residents do stop in, the conversations are "basically about how bad it sucks here," she says.
Gerald Hummel, president of the Greater Lewistown Corp., sees the town as half-full, not half-empty. He points to the highway expansion and the presence of Wal-Mart, or "Wally World," as the locals call it, as examples of growth, not decay, and says the region's access to rail service can attract business.
"The core stuff is here," Hummel says. "What isn't here is anybody's attention" to the area's potential.
Hummel's office is one of several county offices in the space formerly occupied by a Danks department store, which closed eight years ago. The 54,000-square-foot building had been vacant until four years ago.
The recent spate of plant closings follows years of other departures. Rite Aid moved out of town, as did three discount stores -- Murphy's, Kresge's and McCrory's. The Bon-Ton is still in town, Hummel says with pride.
But Hummel doesn't try to hide the obvious, that losses outweigh the gains in Lewistown. He escorts a visitor outside and glances across the parking lot at the latest reminder of that imbalance, the idled Mann Edge Tool building.
"What's happened here has taken place over so many years, it does not strike anyone as being dramatic," he says.
Plenty of volunteers:
Back at the recruiting center, Army Sgt. Joshua Ochs, 31, has no trouble finding volunteers, despite the rising death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They know we're capable of doing more for them than Lewistown can," Ochs says while waiting with his latest recruits for the shuttle bus.
Some people join because "they just want to do their part" for the country, says Ochs, who speaks in short, crisp sentences and wears a closely cropped crewcut. Others join because "there's nothing to do in this town," he says.
The shuttle pulls up, and Frymyer lingers in a long group hug with her family members, who are crying.
Ochs, standing to the side, ends the goodbyes.
"Let's go," he says.
As Frymyer rides off to boot camp, her stepsister, Tabitha Campbell, 13, issues a warning to no one in particular.
"If she gets hurt over there," she says, "we'll go over and nuke 'em."
His employees all bought Model T technology.
Here in Phoenix, the population is increasing with people buying new houses at incredible rates. I'm not talking about illegals, I'm talking about professionals buying 2500 sq/ft houses.
I obviously don't have to explain that all these people have jobs.
The growth of the East valley is somewhere around 1-2 miles of desert built out every year, along a 15-20 mile front.
Stop whining and move to where the jobs are. It's been that way every generation. Still is.
ff
My husband & I had this discussion at lunch today. One reason the Confederacy lost the Civil War was because they had failed to adequately industrialize, and failed to build a substantial rail infrastructure (the interstate highways of the day.) They thought it was sufficient to grow the cotton, haul it to the ports by oxcart, and ship it to England. It wasn't.
We're putting ourselves in the same boat as the antebellum South. Is this really where we want to be, re: our national defense?
"These people" aren't professionals. This country is not going to subsist on 200 million "professionals" (read: people in service industries that are rapidly being outsourced if they don't require direct hands-on work.)
What's the fate of working-class, poorly educated working people in the Novus Ordo Seculorum - to be Soylent Green?
yes, service jobs. as long as population is growing, there are plenty of jobs in construction, real estate, government is growing, more malls, more stores, more restaurants, more health care, more car dealers, more Jiffy Lubes, more hotels.
but at the core of our economy - where is the productive sector that provides middle class jobs? Manufacturing (employment) was destined to decrease due to automation, I accept that. But we had technology and knowledge jobs - but those are taking a big hit from offshoring. Where to next?
Not true at all. Most of the times, the "T" defeats the Rats. That's why we have more R's than D's in Congress and the Legislature, and why the RATs almost never win Senate and row office seats in the State. The only real competition is top of the ticket races (President and Governor), and that comes from ticket splitting RINO's in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs.
I know many people like those described from these areas (unskilled losers to put it bluntly). They are the people who live in those regions and vote Democrat. High School drop-outs, teenage mothers, heroin addicts, etc., etc., etc. They are the people who get jobs at Wal Mart, McDonalds, and the Prison when the local factory closes, simply because there is nothing else they are remotely qualified for. The Republicans, the majority of the people there, are small business owners, people in skilled services, farmers, shop keepers, skilled laborers, and the like. You know, folks with brains. As opposed to folks who think the rest of the world owes them a living.
You wouldn't know it from reading this article, but Mifflin County is actually a tidy and prosperous little place, as a drive down State Route 655 would reveal from the many bustling farms and businesses.
Been through Mifflin County many times. The back route from Rock Springs through Belleville is absolutely breathtaking. It's good to see that the Amish are finding a home there as well. The farmland will stay as active farms for generations to come.
There used to be over a 1 million people employed by the railroads, another 1 million in the steel mills, another 1 million in the mines, and another 1 million by AT&T. Those 4 industries had about 10% of the working population of the US working for them.
Today, those industries produce far more with less than 1/4 of their previous number of employees. Altogether, maybe 1% of American workers work for them now. All those ex-mine employees in Montana and Illinois and West Virginia and Arizona still can't afford a car unless they got a new job using higher skills. Same for all the types who used to work as fireman or brakeman on the railroads, or telephone operators who used to direct calls. Enormous productivity gains have made it possible for those remaining workers in those industries to enjoy a better standard of living. But it came at the cost of throwing at least 3 of every 4 co-workers to the wolves.
All this bellyaching about American job losses in manufacturing, and you'd hardly know that the American manufacturing sector is more modern and productive than ever. China lost a net 15 million manufacturing jobs in the last decade due to productivity gains. Similar story in Mexico.
Jobs aren't being exported abroad, they are being zapped out of existence by technology and efficiency - all around the world. Not just in Lewistown, PA.
Lawyer-Client is an interesting one, but I would make the case that the very nature of this relationship is such that it doesn't really meet the requirements of a normal business transaction. For one thing, most lawyers today operate in a legal system that is little more than a government racket driven by lawyers themselves. In addition, most people who hire lawyers are willing to drive themselves into bankruptcy if their legal problem is serious.
.....Weaseling....
Artist-Fan is certainly worthy of consideration, but I'd have to consider some specific examples to see if there is any merit to this. Most famous artists were damn near broke and never made much money on their work while they were alive.
....Think modern artists like Warhol.
I have to agree with your assessment.
Most of my former in-laws live in Reading or the out-lying areas, Altoona, Huntingdon or the Amish type communities (where they don't vote.)
They are all card-carrying Unionists (firemen, truck drivers, telephone company). The idea that the middle of the state, where NO ONE lives will carry the state is such crap.
Pittsburgh is just as bad. Bitter Iron workers who are pissed that they aren't valued anymore. East, it's dumb-ass textile workers who Unioned themselves out of jobs and wonder why the knitting mills went to Georgia.
There ain't no one to vote Repub in Philly proper anymore.
The unskilled workers world-wide have never been conservatives. They are naturally of the mentality that someone else owes them a living, because they certainly can't see a way to making one themselves.
The Republican party's base has always been the farmers, self-employed, skilled workers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs. People who think and take business risks.
Protecting unskilled assembly line work doesn't help Republicans, and very few of the people on those lines are Republicans.
If their kids don't sell off to the English.
MY idiot farmer relatives in Nebraska think they need more farm subsidies.
tech jobs are being exported abroad. no way around it - they are. the customer service person who used to be in the US working for American Express, is now in India. Period, that job has moved abroad and is now held by a foreign worker.
As I have mentioned on other threads, the current dual trends of exporting jobs and importing cheap labor, if it continues will make the US a European style welfare state by 2010. The liberal voters, plus the votes of displaced workers + the votes of immigrants and minorities will produce a country that is a European style welfare state that has the social problems of Brazil.
My Amish ancestors settled Mifflin County along with some Scots-Irish Presbyterian wahoos. Go look at the dates in the graveyard in Allensville. 1770's and the like.
Its more like the rest of the world is discovering our little hideaway.
There's nothing "weaseling" about it. I specifically said that one major exception to my statement involved cases where government interference distorted economic reality. I can't think of a better example of "government interference" than our current legal system.
Did Andy Warhol make a fortune selling art to people living on modest incomes? Are the Manhattan art galleries in SoHo and the West Village filled with prospective buyers wearing John Deere and Dale Earnhardt Jr. caps?
I don't think anyone misses $6/hour telephone call centers.
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