Middle Class Job Losses Batter Economy

Associated Press | January 2 2006 | Associated Press and Vicki Smith

[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.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Manufacturing jobs are being cut by closing inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Yes, less efficient operations world wide are shutting down which is why manufacturing employment is shrinking while manufacturing output is rising. Even here in the US. And we don't need a conspiracy to explain it.

[nopardons]

I didn't make the rules here; I just stated one correctly. If you don't like the rules here, yell at Jim.

[nopardons]

I have NO intention of watching CINDERELLA MAN. Isn't that movie about a boxer in the 1930s and fictionalized beyond factual recognition?

Neither of my cars is "cheap", you probably can't afford the clothes I buy, and none of your post has a single thing to do with the article that heads this thread.

[nopardons]

Those on your side, kept saying that corporations aren't people. And no matter what all of your CCPing says, corporations aren't human, but are owned and run by humans.

Marxists ARE stupid. If you want to argue this point...fee free. b:-)

[nopardons]

Comrade, your lack of factual knowledge re the steel industry here and when it began to collapse, is glaring. The massive amounts of strikes, escalating union demands, and (yes, here you are correct, but decades late ) ignoring updating, began in the late 1960s, but hit its stride in the 1960s.

Since you're against CAPITALISM, you really should consider moving to Cuba or perhaps even N.Korea..."worker's paradises" both. :-)

[Nowhere Man]

That may be true. No idea. They certainly don't appear to have a grip on what real life is among the 'unwashed'. And they certainly think we're all stupid - everyone, apparently; but, them....

That's the problem, as radio talkshow host, Chuck Harder, said a lot time ago, there are some who do fail to see the points we are trying to make because it hasn't affected them yet. I've resolved it is that there are some who need to experience that firsthand because the cannot see what we mean from their vantage point. Call it what you will, old line Calvinism (where bad things happen because of you and nothing else, sort of like the Christian version of karma) to "Prosperity Gospel."

Also, (if I may bum your theory, Sam) the idea of "The Business of America is Business" went out with Herbert Hoover, Atwater Kent radios and "23 Skidoo." That old adage of Coolidge and Hoover lost in 1935 (although it started to lose ground under early progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London in the prior generation) and replaced by the New Deal of FDR and Truman later on. Many if not most of the voters of the Republicans from Ronald Reagan to today are the children and grandchildren of those New Dealers, myself included and the great grandchildren of the muckrackers a generation before. Heck, after some of my ancestors came over from Russia, they became active in the labor movement with the coal mines. In short, being the Trekker that I am, that line of thinking is, "it's dead, Jim."

Getting back to the segment that makes the large base of current and past (to 1980) Republican voters, they voted Republican because of things like getting a strong military, opposing homosexual marriage, opposing gun control, stopping the rabid environmentalists, getting tough on crime, and so on. Most economic issues, except the idea of having good jobs to support their families, are esoteric at best, non-existant at worst. Now with that in mind, the free trader's best allies are the lefty "barking moonbats" that shifts the Democrats so far left, a huge chunk of the socially conservative former Democrats will vote Republican. Now if things tank, that will become less relevant as the voter wll be willing to go with the side that will answer the questions of, "who is better able to help me feed my family?"

I think the next big issue that will be fouht over is healthcare. I do forsee some sort of single payer or socialized healthcare in the US by 2015 or 2020 although there are some who say sooner. It is inevitable.

I'm not picking on anyone here or pick fights but being the armchair historian that I am, I figure I would weigh in.

[nopardons]

Thank you for proving my point! It is YOU who needs lessons in reading comprehension; not to mention lessons in how to write cogent English prose.

I know that you still wont be able to see what I am alluding to, in this post of yours, but do, please, give it a try.

The "principles of the Founders"? Oh yes, how could I have forgotten, surly, there are massive amounts of anti-corportation prose in the Federalist Papers. Oh, that's right...there isn't. Nor is there anything remotely anit-capitalist in the BoR and the Constitution. Shucks, no, there isn't. Page after page of it in POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC? Nope, not there either.

Why are you so certain that stiff tariffs will be such a boon? Smoot-Hawly must mean nothing whatsoever to you.

Some of the FFs not only believed that slavery was a good thing, they were slave holders. None of them could manage a way to abolish it and still keep all of the colonies together, to form this nation. If you want to go back to that time, you'll have to invent a working time machine. But I doubt that you would last a month, in that era, no matter what you imagine.

[hedgetrimmer]

Neither of my cars is "cheap", you probably can't afford the clothes I buy,

Class warfare is NOT a Conservative value and none of the FFs would agree with you on this subject.

429 posted on 01/02/2006 9:59:01 PM PST by nopardons

[nopardons]

Well, that makes three of us.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "less efficient operations world wide are shutting down [including China]"

You are right, sort of. . if one doesn't mind getting dizzy from the spin.

I did not make my point well.

My point: You insult western free market enterprises by equating them to Mao-era, Communist-owned worthless "enterprises".

Here's what I mean

Haier Group, China's largest kitchen-appliance maker, is NOT losing jobs nor are any of the modern enterprises built largely with western FDI and technology. These special economic zone enterprises are equivalent to western enterprises. I guess so they either conned, extorted or stole it from western useful idiots.

The old, worthless Mao-era Communist "workers' paradise" enterprises -- we pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us -- are losing jobs and a lot more jobs would be lost if a revolution would not be the result of cutting more "manufacturing" jobs. It is the Chi-coms' banks' nonperforming loans that are keeping these remaining cesspools of waste funded and open.

The point, a second time: you insult western free market enterprises by equating them to such Communist "enterprises" as Qingdao people's Refrigerator Factory -- those are the "manufacturing jobs" that are being lost.

A little history from several Internet sources.

Haier started out as Qingdao peoples' Refrigerator Factory, a state-run enterprise turning out low-cost, low-quality products.

Zhang Ruimin took over in 1984. Mr. Zhang, a Communist Party member and local-government bureaucrat, instituted management and quality-control standards at the plant with assistance from one of Germany's largest appliance makers.

The first thing Mr. Zhang did is assemble the often drunk "employees" of the Refrigerator Factory -- one source said that it was common for the "workers" to urinate on the assembly line -- and proceeded to smash the assembled, worthless refrigerators with a sledgehammer.

My point a third time, you insult western free market enterprises by equating them to Mao-era, Communist-owned worthless "enterprises" like the people's Refrigerator Factory.

You can call those Communist cesspool enterprises "less efficient operations" if you want and spin the B.S. that China is losing jobs like every western free enterprise country but it's still spin B.S.

[A. Pole]

Now with that in mind, the free trader's best allies are the lefty "barking moonbats" that shifts the Democrats so far left, a huge chunk of the socially conservative former Democrats will vote Republican. Now if things tank, that will become less relevant as the voter wll be willing to go with the side that will answer the questions of, "who is better able to help me feed my family?"

It might be correct.

[A. Pole]

I think the next big issue that will be fouht over is healthcare. I do forsee some sort of single payer or socialized healthcare in the US by 2015 or 2020 although there are some who say sooner. It is inevitable.

I think by 2008, no later than 2009 we will have it. (Elections in 2006 plus 2008 will do it)

[A. Pole]

Oh yes, how could I have forgotten, surly, there are massive amounts of anti-corportation prose in the Federalist Papers. Oh, that's right...there isn't. Nor is there anything remotely anit-capitalist in the BoR and the Constitution.

Corporations acquired and exceeded the rights of human beings much later after writing of Federalist Papers and the Constitution.

[nopardons]

Take it all up; with the poster I was replying to. He, not I, is the one who claimed that the FFs had set in stone,the way corporations "must" operate. LOL

[tyen]

I was speaking in general terms.

Okay, fair enough. I'm interested in your specific situation and instead of talking generalities like we have in this thread, I want to see what can be done about your individual circumstances, because I fall in the camp of people who believe that there are still enormous opportunities in this country.

For the record, I have worked on software systems where if X was not done by Y time, Z million dollars would be lost. Where Y time is six hours from the word "go", on a configuration I've never seen before in my life, and with a group of people I've never worked with before and now have to work with in perfect synchrony through only a phone and instant messaging connection. When you have that level of expertise, charging $50/hour and up is not a problem (actually, I charge 400% of that and my engagement calendar is still booked as much as I like, but you can reasonably expect $50-80/hour of W-2 employment at that level of expertise if you work for someone else), and you've indicated that you would consider that more than acceptable compared to your current situation.

Now, if it is true that you work in Windows support as freedumb2003 thinks, then yes, you have many long nights of studying ahead of you. However, I'm going to go with what little you have shared so far in this thread, instead of conjectures. You have indicated that you cannot move away from where you live (Indiana), and it has been a little over a year since your position was offshored. You claim you currently make $7 per hour. You say you have already looked at the construction market. Judging by your posts, I know that you can string together coherent sentences, though I can't tell one way or the other if you can put together reports for management consumption (I suspect you would be able to, or at least taught the skill in a year otherwise). Your offshored position was at EDS. You have some level of programming skills in C, C++, Pascal, and x86 assembler. You have about 10 years of PC sales experience.

You definitely don't have money to throw at your predicament, and possibly not very much time (say, 10-20 hours per week). You apparently do have enough time and/or money to get onto the Internet, at dialup speeds at least; otherwise we wouldn't be here on FreeRepublic. Whether you have to get onto the Net through the public library or through your own connection, the salient fact is you are finding the time to get on the Net.

Does this accurately describe your situation?

[Havoc]

Wikipedia is a liberal rag, sorry. And you are rather narrow in your definition.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=treason

[Cogadh na Sith]

"There's no guarantee anymore. No pensions. No health care. No job security. We have none of those things anymore."

Welcome to Generation-X.

Now get back to work! Those Bush-hating old hippies need more chai!

(Anyhow, who ever thought your stupid job was supposed to provide a pension, security and a doctor!?)

[Havoc]

Sure it did - in an alternate universe where everyone is you and has your circumstance in life, perhaps your fictional vision of things would work. But everyone doesn't have your circumstance, etc. You might as well set up a recursive "if" loop for a perfect world scenario and tell us how everything will work "if".

[Havoc]

The so-called dirty trick was a picture -- real or doctored -- of Perot's daughter kissing Madonna.

Yeah, right. They apparently threatened to wreck the wedding of Perot's daughter. Is your daughter worth a political office? Some people in this country have priorities and moral convictions. Just because you don't doesn't mean the world should stop and act like you want it to act.

[Havoc]

Sorry, no. I'm not a defeatist who just gives up because my enemies tell me it's done and can't be undone. The message is, we're going to ruin you - lay down and take it. Since when is that how Americans think or act! Pound sand!