Posted on 01/02/2006 4:19:44 AM PST by ventana
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.
How many of those houses were paid off by union workers and non-union workers? Blue-collar workers, that so many seem to despise on this forum, have the same goals and desires as white collar workers. The want to be able to raise a family and enjoy life. Yet, when a blue-collar guy gets a raise its a bad thing. If a CEO or upper management guy gets millions that's justified.
There is a clear bias against blue collar workers; they are labeled as beer swilling barbarians who don't know their ass from their elbow.
While anyone who went to college and can claim to be white collar is held up in high regard.
Home ownership, which is at an all time high, is good if the houses are paid off. At the same time we know that American's savings rate is about 1% and they are mortgaged to the hilt much like the feds. It can't be sustained over the long run especially if there is some world-wide event like a major war.
If that happens and our economy recedes, home ownership will become the purview of the banks or rather Fannie Mae and Mac. Who will prop them up if the housing bubble bursts?
The middle class will disappear and those homes that aren't paid off will become property of the government.
What state do you live in? Every state I have ever lived in had community colleges. These are basically very low cost. In many cases they are free.
I know of no one who looks down on somebody because of the work they choose, but at the same time you just can't be surprised that doctors make more than teachers or mechanics (unless you are an Internists vs a F1 team mechanic). If you want to become well off you need a plan. The richest people I know in the field of technology did not complete college (Gates and Elison). Not everyone desires wealth or needs it to be happy. And people are not always happy when the have money.
LOL! thank GOD you had the patience to deal with that rambling of hyperbole....lol--
You aren't supposed to feel sorry for him, despite the article's spin.
I merely address WHY he and others like him are facing what they are facing.
oh- and I was not asking to challenge you-- I actually directed my question to you because you seemed to know what you were talking about-- I am asking in sincereity - not to debate it-- honestly to understand it...
As to the rest of your tinfoil, crazy spew...where did all of THAT come from? I haven't posted a single thing, in seven plus years here ( go look up all of my post! ), where I said that blue collar workers are garbage. "Bias"? Go look in the mirror, if you want to see someone who is choking on biased problems!
No college degree? Hell...go to N.Y.C., join the union, and you too can make $60,000+ a year, with a whole lot of benefits, and be able to retire at close to full pay, for doing an unskilled job in the subway.
Americans haven't been savers for the past 50+ years. I don't know why ( I am a saver; always have been ) and it isn't because they are living from hand to mouth. Saving is a mindset, which went out of fashion long ago.
Is there a full moon out tonight?
Household net worth is at an all time high, $51 trillion. Average home equity is 57.1%
Federal Reserve, page 110 of 124
The middle class will disappear and those homes that aren't paid off will become property of the government.
Under what fevered scenario do these homes become property of the government?
I don't think so, but a lot of these post surely gives one pause.
ROFLLLL!!!!
whew! I thought I was the only one feeling that way- lol!
I was bored and thought I was coming onto a boring economics thread- lol-- wow! what a surprise...
The tinfoil wearing doom&gloomers/THE SKY IS FALLING are out in force tonight. All emotion and no facts, appears to be their MO.
The BoR and the Constitution do NOT guarantee every one a job, nor home ownership, or the "RIGHT" to dictate what a business /corporation may and may not do. Neither do any of these documents ( not even any amendment! ) list corporations with workers in other countries as traitors. There aren't any laws against your caviling either.
Frankly, in my eyes, you're posting emotional, tinfoil gibberish, which is bordering on the insane.
This article is posted several other places online and the byline is Kathy Barks Hoffman, AP writer.
Hang on tight...we're in for a bumpy ride down the rabbit hole. LOL
The focus on quarterly results comes hand in glove with the liquidity that provides the jobs we have. Without this liquidity the economy would be far worse.
Sorry to hear that unskilled high school grads are losing their 100K per year jobs and have to sell their boats and second homes on the lake.
Meanwhile, the doorknobs fell off the last car they made for me, after all of about six weeks. And their buddies at Ford are building diesel F-150's that start to fail on the way home from the dealership.
Yeah, its a tough life out there for the ol' middle class.
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