Jobs come and go, and sometimes they just go

The words were those of a steelworker in Pennsylvania, but they could just have easily been from a miner, or a lumber mill hand, or an airplane assembly mechanic.

"We were . . . people nobody thought much of, and we became halfway decent people. We were almost middle class."

In fact they were middle class, the huge cadre of Americans who, without connections or college degrees or inheritance, built a more than comfortable life for themselves and their families.

They did so on the strength of what we used to call skilled blue-collar jobs, with respectable paychecks attached, in the machine shops and on factory floors and assembly lines of this country.

If the continuing erosion of those jobs has been an ongoing story of the past two decades -- the quote above is from William Serrin's 1993 book "Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town" -- what this country does to stem the erosion, or whether anyone believes it matters, will be an emerging story to watch in 2003.

Jobs come and go, companies come and go, industries come and go; that's one of the hazards of living in a system with a certain degree of economic freedom.

They come and go for reasons too timeless to call a trend -- the business cycle, bad or short-sighted management, changing technology or customer tastes, depletions or shifts in raw material supplies.

Usually there's something to replace those jobs. That's one of the benefits to living in a system with a certain degree of economic freedom.

But what's been going on in the past two decades has been a phenomenon beyond that cycle. Jobs, companies and industries are going away, and they're not being replaced.

Even the most cursory of searches indicates that the phenomenon is not slowing. Vacuum cleaner-maker Bissell Inc. recently announced a plan to move 200 jobs from Michigan to its manufacturing centers in Texas and Mexico.

Maytag Corp. said it would close a 1,600-employee refrigerator plant in Galesburg, Ill., and move it to Mexico.

Kaiser Aluminum last week announced a deal to sell its Tacoma Tideflats smelter to the Port of Tacoma, which will likely flatten it to use the site as a container terminal; that smelter once employed more than 350 workers.

In the Stevens County town of Addy, Alcoa subsidiary Northwest Alloys announced a deal to sell an idled magnesium smelter, which will be shipped to Malaysia; that plant once accounted for 300 jobs.

And we've all heard the predictions from Boeing Co. executives that even if the commercial aerospace sector recovers, Puget Sound-region aerospace employment will never reach the peaks of previous boom cycles.

The contemporary reason is this: If those jobs don't come back, then the paychecks that accompany those jobs won't be there to drive an economic rebound in 2003. Consumer spending and retail sales can only do so much.

The long-term issue is this: If we don't have those jobs, not only for their own sake but for the others they generate, then what's to replace them?

Dismiss this if you will as just misplaced nostalgia for a manufacturing economy that is never coming back, just as some people long for a return to a nation of farmers.

Americans may have moved off the farms, but America didn't give up farming. We drove down the cost of production and drove up the efficiency -- something you can't learn how to do if you don't have the farms on which to innovate. And we kept the supply, transportation, marketing, finance, machinery and equipment and processing jobs that had agriculture at their core.

Losing manufacturing loses the jobs themselves, the jobs that support and feed off them and the platform from which innovation, new technology and entire new industries emerge.

The manufacturing jobs that have been lost are gone for lots of reasons, cheaper labor abroad being a common culprit, cheaper electricity being a frequent reason for plants like Kaiser's to be idled.

In some cases, the age of the facility is cited as the cause. But what's worrisome is that no one thought it worthwhile to invest in updates and modernizations. Or at least it ought to worry someone -- bet it worried those who once had those jobs.

The Employment Security Departments projections for job growth by industry and sector suggest one possibility: health services, one of the biggest categories both for percentage gain (2.2 percent for 2005 to 2010) and raw number of jobs (24,500 in that period). The aging population is frequently cited as a prime driver for that growth.

Certainly it is our fervent hope when we are eventually carted off to the Shady Nook Rest Home for Doddering Journalists, there will be someone there to cook our gruel and listen to our endless stories about how great we were and how these young whippersnappers of today just don't measure up.

But is that what we want to rely on to generate wealth in our economy? Just how well-paying are those jobs likely to be, given that we can barely afford the system we've got now?

The biggest projected percentage growth of any category in the Employment Security report is for computer and data processing, with a 3.8 percent gain for 2005-2010 coming on top of a 3.7 percent gain for the five-year period we're now in.

But would you like to count on that growth? Here's a piece of bad news: That kind of work is even more portable than a metals smelter or an aircraft assembly plant. About all you need is one decent high-speed phone line and your programming work is being done not in Redmond but, oh, say, Bangalore.

There are lots of quick fixes to the problem -- centralized industrial planning, massive trade barriers on the exportation of technology or the importation of finished goods, domestic content laws, tax code rewrites to punish companies that cut employment -- all with their own unattractive features and unintended consequences, not to mention dubious likelihood of actually solving the original problem.

More to the point will be lots of tweaks and small changes that add up to a significant shift in allowing us to keep the manufacturers of today as the generator of companies and jobs of tomorrow. Encouraging technology that makes energy production and use far more cost-efficient would be one place to start.

But much more significant will be whether anyone believes the debate is worth having. The new year would be an excellent time to have it.

True, this is a two-decade-old problem. Putting it off yet another year, the easiest and most likely course of action, probably wouldn't be calamitous.

Unless you're the one hoping there's a job out there tomorrow to replace the one you're losing today.

Whaen the forum ctivity level incrases in the morning the free-trade kooks wil come on the thread to tell us these are buggy whip industries that should be exported while the displaced workers should become high level investment bankers talking to each other over telephones.

I have the same opinion of companies that move there jobs overseas as I do for people that smoke...I know in the long run its not going to be good for us, but not sure I want to pass any laws to prevent it. After all, it is supposed to be a free country. Unfortunatgely, I do agree that in the not-so-long term this movement of jobs overseas is eventiually going hurt us real bad (worse than it has already).

Afterall, when all those jobs are overseas, who do these companies think is going to be left to buy there products?

Afterall, when all those jobs are overseas, who do these companies think is going to be left to buy there products?

----------------------

Bingo!

Pat Buchannan and Ross Perot did not get very many votes, and still would not get very many. Those 2 were the strongest supporters of American jobs, and who were against NAFTA, etc.

I dont think most people care that Americans are going to lose all of our manufacturing and technical jobs.

How many will the container terminal employ? Given the salraies earned by ILWU longshoremen ($80K+) this could be a net gain for the local economy.

"He [Buchanan] was sent in by the Republicans to destroy the Reform Party."

Better watch out for those black helicopters over your house right now...

This 1960's mentality of "everything is a conspiracy" is boring. Get a new act.

Keywords in article:

"steelworker"
"miner"
"lumber mill"
"smelter"

Key quote:

Jobs come and go, companies come and go, industries come and go; that's one of the hazards of living in a system with a certain degree of economic freedom. They come and go for reasons too timeless to call a trend -- the business cycle, bad or short-sighted management, changing technology or customer tastes, depletions or shifts in raw material supplies.

Could government play a huge role in why jobs come and go? Specifically government regulation in the environmental area?

Let's face it; the United States and particularly liberal Democrats want to kick the steel, mining, logging, and smelting industries to the curb. To anyone with money, the local steel mill, surface mine, sawmill, or smelter is a bad neighbor that could just as easily exist in a foreign country. NIMBYism and its government attendant are hammering many of the nails into the coffin of America's basic industries.

As much as I would like to blast the simplicity of your remarks, I will instead direct my attention to said article.
I think the article is spot on and is really a remarkable piece of journalism in this day and age, when everyone has an agenda.
It speaks of the jobs going away, and speaks of the unintended consequences should we try to artificially retain these jobs.
America is staring a neutron bomb dead in the eyes.
You idle the greater middle class, by unemployment or even more importantly underemployment, and you begin to introduce doubt into the great American experiment/dream.
You introduce too great of a degree of doubt and negative things can result.
I would say one only has to spend a little time in an inner city slum, and not only will you see the doubt, but you can actually feel it.
To transport this feeling and anger to the middle class would be nothing short of national suicide.

"steelworker"
"miner"
"lumber mill"
"smelter"

Revisit DoctorHydrocal's Keywords in the article.

What they have in common is not only environmental exposure,
but heavily unionized work forces..

The people who put up the money and take the risk making
jobs possible have government imposing ever-increasing
environmental regulations on them on one side while on the
other side, corrupt labor unions drive wages ever higher to
satisfy the hungers of the Mafia. Hillary Clinton's virtual
queen-hood over the laborer's union isn't an anomaly.

Excessive taxation drives companies offshore while those who stay
export jobs to remain in business in the international competitive community.
It really isn't that difficult to understand.

It isn't that hard to understand. And as you clearly indicate, it feeds off itself.
Now it has crept up to the average middle income family and after it consumes the middle class, it will move on up the food chain until it collapses upon itself.
We, as Americans, think we have stepped in the way and have for the first time in my lifetime elected the pubbies to control all three branches of gov.
This is an attempt to stop the ball from rolling downhill and gathering momentum, if this fails, what are the recourses left?
This is why these issues are important and will decide the future destiny of the country.

Unions and their goons drive up the cost of their labor to the point it becomes more productive to have it done out of the country. Then they wonder why their jobs go away. Funny how it works.

This union bashing makes some feel good - but it is not true. Are you trying to tell everyone that every job we have lost is a union job? Of course not. Also, I am amazed at the huge salaries that are quoted for union jobs.

While the union did have something to do with work going overseas, that argument is way outdated and overexaggerated.

Try greed, corporate and political. Try government involvement in this debacle. Try the government uses our tax dollars to grease the way for these companies to move overseas.

The old "union is to blame for all our problems" is years out of date.

As Mark Steyn (?) quoted Fred Reed in one of Steyn's articles, freedom is its own destruction. That is, it promotes the human tendencies towards self-interest and larceny. In time, it may be necessary to tear everything down and reset government back to 1776. Ballots are supposed to allow us to do that, but as the rape and pillaging of the Tenth Amendment proves, ballots are not effective when the only viable political parties place power above restraint.

Look at the types of industry in the article. These are unionized industries.

As the article did point out certain industries - I got the gist of the article as the sheer number of jobs being lost and not replaced. Now once again, not all jobs that go overseas is unionized - not by a long shot. Therefore, you cannot lay this at the feet of the evil unions. AS popular as it was a few years ago, it is just outdated.

How do you explain the loss of non-union jobs - what did they do wrong that they deserved to loose their jobs?

"What did they do wrong to deserve to lose their jobs?"

Forgive me, but I would expect something like that at DU, not here. Capital flow isn't about what someone deserves to be doing with their lives. I began finding myself less employable
when I crossed fifty years of age. Now I am looking at an uplanned, early retirement. My skills never stopped improving yet I am forced out of my industry at the height of my abilities. To use words like 'wrong' and 'deserve' when dealing with marketplace realities is too far to the left for me.

"I began finding myself less employable when I crossed fifty years of age. Now I am looking at an uplanned, early retirement. My skills never stopped improving yet I am forced out of my industry at the height of my abilities. To use words like 'wrong' and 'deserve' when dealing with marketplace realities is too far to the left for me."

I too, find myself in a similar situation and I am in my mid 40's.
I worked very hard at what I did and was quite accomplished, hung a few skins on the wall as they say.
It doesn't matter now, I downsized and am raising some fine Longhorns now. It is a whole lot more fun and the animals are as intelligent or moreso, than 90% of the people I used to work with.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.