Middle Class Job Losses Batter Economy

AP Middle-Class Job Losses Batter Workforce Sunday January 1, 8:53 pm ET By Kathy Barks Hoffman, Associated Press Writer Middle-Class Job Losses Batter Workforce As Companies Slash Payrolls, Send Jobs Overseas

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- Thirty years ago, Dan Fairbanks looked at the jobs he could get with his college degree and what he could make working the line at General Motors Corp., and decided the GM job looked better.

He still thinks he made the right choice. But with GM planning to end production of the Chevrolet SSR and shut down the Lansing Craft Centre where he works sometime in mid-2006, Fairbanks faces an uncertain future.

"Back when I hired in at General Motors 30 years ago, it seemed like a good, secure job," said Fairbanks, president since June of UAW Local 1618. Since then, "I've seen good times and I've seen bad times. This qualifies as a bad time, in more ways than one."

Many of the country's manufacturing workers are caught in a worldwide economic shift that is forcing companies to slash payrolls or send jobs elsewhere, leaving workers to wonder if their way of life is disappearing.

The trend in the manufacturing sector toward lower pay, fewer benefits and fewer jobs is alarming many of them.

"They end up paying more of their health care and they end up with lousier pensions -- if they keep one at all," says Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney. As wages and benefits drop, "it's the working class that's paying the price."

West Virginia steelworkers are all too familiar with the problem. The former Weirton Steel Corp., which 20 years ago had some 13,000 employees, today has just 1,300 union workers left on the job.

The steel mill has changed hands twice in two years, and just last month, Mittal Steel Co. told the Independent Steelworkers Union it would permanently cut the jobs of 800 people who'd been laid off since summer.

Larry Keister, 50, of Weirton, W.Va., has 31 years in the mill that his father and brothers all joined. His son tried, but got laid off quickly.

"I'm too old to go back to school. I've worked there all my life," says Keister, who drives a buggy in the tin mill. "I went there straight out of high school. It's all I know."

Though Keister is safe for now from layoffs, he wonders what will happen to the hundreds of friends and co-workers who will be jobless by the end of January.M

Gary Colflesh, 56, of Bloomingdale, Ohio, said there are few jobs in nearby Ohio or Pennsylvania for workers to move to.

"They're destroying the working class. Why can't people see this?" asked the 38-year veteran. "Anybody who works in manufacturing has no future in this country, unless you want to work for wages they get in China."

Abby Abdo, 52, of Weirton, said workers once believed that if they accepted pay cuts and shunned strikes, they would keep their jobs. Not anymore.

"Once they get what they want, they kick us to the curb," he said. "There's no guarantee anymore. No pensions. No health care. No job security. We have none of those things anymore."

Fairbanks of the Lansing GM plant said the changes are going to force a lot of people to retrench to deal with the new economic reality. For some, it will make it harder to send their children to college or be able to retire when they want. For others, it will mean giving up some of the trappings a comfortable income can bring.

"You're going to see lake property, you're going to see boats, you're going to see motorcycles hit the market," he said. "People get rid of the toys."

Economists agree the outlook is changing for workers who moved from high school to good-paying factory jobs two and three decades ago, or for those seeking that lifestyle now.

"It was possible for people with a high school education to get a job that paid $75,000 to $100,000 and six weeks of paid vacation. Those jobs are disappearing," says Patrick Anderson of Anderson Economic Group in East Lansing, Mich. "The ... low-skill, upper-middle-class way of life is in danger."

General Motors Corp. has announced that it plans to cut 30,000 hourly jobs by 2008. Ford Motor Co. is scheduled to announce plant closings and layoffs in January that could affect at least 15,000 workers in the United States and Mexico, analysts say, and is cutting thousands from its white-collar work force.

GM and Ford have won concessions from the United Auto Workers that will require active and retired workers to pick up more of their health care costs, and DaimlerChrysler AG is seeking similar concessions.

Thomas Klier, senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, says the transition for manufacturers toward leaner, lower-cost operations has been going on for some time. But the bankruptcy of the nation's largest auto supplier, Delphi Corp., pushed the issue into the headlines.

Its 34,000 hourly U.S. workers could see their pay cut from $27 an hour to less than half of that, although the company is still trying to work out a compromise unions will support. Workers also could have to pay health care deductibles for the first time and lose their dental and vision care coverage.

Delphi worker Michael Balls of Saginaw, Mich., hears the argument that U.S. companies' costs are too high to compete with plants that pay workers less overseas, but he doesn't buy it.

"I think if Delphi wins, they lose," he says. "If I'm making $9 an hour, I'm not making enough to buy vehicles."

Unfortunately for workers like Balls, the old rules no longer apply in the new global economy, says John Austin, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Brookings Institute.

"We're in a different ball game now," Austin says. "We're going to be shedding a lot of the low-education manufacturing jobs."

Some of those workers are likely to try to move into the growing service sector, Austin says. But he says the transition can be tough, even if the jobs pay as well as the ones they had -- and many don't.

"Pointing out a medical technician job is available if they go back and get a certificate doesn't solve the issue today for those 45-year-olds who are losing their jobs at Delphi," he said.

Dick Posthumus, a partner in an office furniture system manufacturing company in Grand Rapids, Mich., says that "basic, unskilled manufacturing is going to be done in China, India, places like that because we are in a global world, and there's nothing anyone can do about that."

His company, Compatico Inc., buys much of its basic parts from South Korea, Taiwan, Canada and China, where Posthumus has toured plants he says rival modern manufacturing plants in the U.S. But the company still saves its sophisticated parts-making and assembly for its Michigan plant.

"The manufacturing of tomorrow is going to look somewhat different from the manufacturing of yesterday," Posthumus says. "It doesn't mean that we no longer manufacture ... (But) it's going to be a painful adjustment."

Associated Press Writer Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., contributed to this story.

Your response, among its many flaws, posits a possibility of a static system. That is an impossibility and the world changes daily. It was once common for 90% or more of our population to live on food they themselves had grown. To suggest, in the 18th century, that one day less than 2% of the population would be farmers would have suggested mass starvation to a person of that day. Few of us farm today and fewer still, starve. The world has changed and the world will continue to change and an inability to adjust and adapt to that change is not a virtue.

What you call Randian is rationalism and realism. No legislation can long protect an unrealistic wage for an anacronistic job in a marketplace that has choices. That is a fact. Any plan that ignores that fact is a wish, not a plan.

The eschelons of corporate America are so short-sighted and focused only on their own bonuses, they're ignoring the effect they're having on their own country. They're greedy traitors.

American corporations are not as successful as they used to be. They have cut quality enough. What's a corporation to do? They have to reduce costs. Shortly corporations will have to offload their health and pension costs to the government. Hell maybe GM and follow the debt practices of the federal government, create bonds and sell them to China.

Unless you lived in the old USSR, or some other place with the same rules, no worker has EVER been guaranteed a job. No person, not even slaves, was ever guaranteed a job for life in this country.

Until recent history ( and I do mean rather recent history !), those who worked in some form of manufacturing, were laid off at the will of the owner. Get mangled in a machine? TOUGH LUCK...you were fired and no, you didn't get any severance pay nor medical benefits. Go out on strike? You would get shot/fired on and absolutely have no job to go back to! New immigrant waves? Hold on to you hat, whoa Nellie...you were OUT ON YOUR EAR, because the new immigrants would work for less! Outsourcing? That isn't "new" either!

And owning your own home, was, until very recently, something only that most could only dream of.

No legislation can long protect an unrealistic wage for an anacronistic job in a marketplace that has choices.

True, but we are not talking about protecting a job, but an entire industrial base. If cars can no longer be competitively produced here, then we have better find something that can be produced here; something, that would be grand enough to employ the displaced workforce, and valuable enough to exchange for cars and other goods. This is what innovation and competitive positioning use to be about; we may not be able to compete with the least cost provider, but we should certainly be able to create and distinguish a premium first world product from 3rd world junk.

Ever read about the "ROBBER BARONS" ?

Making money isn't "traitorous", unless, like the Clinton bought pardonee Mark Rich, you are a crook and a for REAL traitor.

You really need to stop misusing the word "traitor"; it doesn't help your argument at all.

"Thirty years ago, Dan Fairbanks looked at the jobs he could get with his college degree and what he could make working the line at General Motors Corp., and decided the GM job looked better."

We all have to live with the consequences of our individual bad choices. He decided to let GM control his future, instead of controlling his future himself by going to school.

Now that it's time to pay the piper, he wants to blame everything on the fact that things change.

No one to blame but himself.

Business breaks the law so we pass new laws and stricter enforcement to balance the lack of business ethics and business whines about being treated unfairly just because they have no ethics. Boohoo. Cry me a river and make me care. Sounds as bad as liberals.

No, my friend. YOU sound like the liberal.

The keystone of America is freedom, and that includes the freedom to move your business anywhere around the world one would choose.

Only a liberal would DEMAND that you locate a business to a place of the liberal's choosing, even if that means subjecting oneself to things one chooses NOT to be subjected.

Likewise, you have the freedom NOT to buy the product in question. But stop implying some nefarious motive to someone who is simply exercising their God-given right to free choice.

Assault and battery and theft are illegal.

Which are the rules of the road in U.S. trade, governed and enforced under U.S. law, and protected thereby.

But not so in international trade...

Regulating foreign commerce was supposed to be enforced by our Congress, as per the Constitution. Not abdicated to a World Court with personnel from all corners who want to get the USA...or worse still, enter sham treaties (but fail to gain the constitutionally required 2/3rds support in the Senate) that render the US production defenseless against unfairnesses blatantly manufactured by foreign governments willy-nilly ...and then just pretend those unfairnesses are okay. "It's free trade, after all..."

Unfortunately for workers like Balls, the ~~old rules~~ Constitution no longer ~~apply~~ applies in the new global economy, says John Austin, a senior fellow with the ~~Washington-based~~ global socialist Brookings Institute.

And owning your own home, was, until very recently, something only that most could only dream of.

Until the mid 19th century, the US was a wild and untaimed frontier backwaters. We have made progress since then, especially during the first half of the 20th century, and some of us believe those advancements worthy of protection.

no one ever guaranteed you that the plan you made 30 years ago was good for all time.

And yet who could have imagined how the "free traders" would undermine the US Constitution so effectively? Now, people who support Constitutional tariffs and congressional authority over trade, are now derided as "protectionists". And the "free traders" who promote global rules and authority over the American people, undermining their right to self determination, and who promote a form of global socialism to "fight poverty" and the downward harmonization of American standards of living with the third world congratulate themselves shamelessly on their accomplishments. Go figure.

Abigale Adams begged her husband, in letters, to try to get her pins ( for sewing ) from Europe. They weren't made in America... And America has been buying "cheap goods", which were NOT made in America, for many, many, MANY generations; this is nothing new.

Uh, just what makes you think those pins were cheap??! Do you have any idea about the cost of importing things in those days?

Seems to me your usage of the Abigail Adams example and attempt to "pin" your hopes on that...points up a number of the free traders mistakes: The view of any reaonable person would be that the example instead proves the need, not for for free trade, but for a robust indigenous U.S. (or should I say, Colonial) manufacturing base. One which the British attempted to prohibit, so that they could monopolize manufactures. And btw, there weren't any egregious U.S. unions for you to genuflect against, unless you count the FreeMasons. And most of the Founders were such...

Care to explain why non-union made Toyotas cost more than Fords, or Chevy's???

Better quality, maybe? Care to explain why and how a Kia made in Korea for a couple thouand bucks costs you 16,000 after it makes the boat ride across the pond???

Maybe the ride across the pond costs $$, and maybe there is import fees.

Besides, people in South Korea do not make 25-cents a day like some imply. In fact, they are fairly modernized in their culture and pay scale.

And the "free traders" who promote global rules and authority over the American people, undermining their right to self determination, and who promote a form of global socialism to "fight poverty" and the downward harmonization of American standards of living with the third world congratulate themselves shamelessly on their accomplishments.

Bump. Sigh. It is too true.

You really need to stop misusing the word "traitor"; it doesn't help your argument at all.

"free traders" hate that word, yet it is the word that best describes the "free trader" when it comes to citizenship, sovereignty and constitutional government. So why shouldn't it be used?

This is key to restoring American 'foundational' productive capacities that have been negligently lost...and have not been properly appreciated...and probably won't be until we are at war with the country that now has them.

Well blow me down with a feather.

Are you really contemplating going to war with a country because they have cheaper labor than us?

The keystone of America is freedom, and that includes the freedom to move your business anywhere around the world one would choose.

No.

The keystone is liberty.

Liberty is not without the reciprocal obligations of DUTY.

Why do you think Theodore Roosevelt proudly declaimed: "Thank God I am not a free trader!" ?

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