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In a small town, workers question the future after factory shutdowns
Access North Georgia ^ | August 9 , 2003 | The Associated Press

Posted on 08/09/2003 3:39:59 PM PDT by Willie Green

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

DOUGLAS, Ga. - When the fourth factory quit town, 535 more voices joined the luckless chorus asking what is happening to this rural centers hardest-won jobs.

Lewis Burkett knows the answer.

He knows because, when his plant closed last year, Intermetro Industries asked him to spend two more weeks on a special assignment _ smoothing out the bumps at a new wire-shelving factory replacing the one where hed worked for 17 years.

Burkett arrived in the northern Mexican city of Cuauhtemoc to find a spotless building housing many of the very same machines, rebuilt and repainted, that commanded the factory floor in Douglas.

A Catholic priest was ushered in and laborers gathered as he solemnly blessed the machinery with holy water. Then the production line wailed back to life.

When I went to the plant and saw them doing the same things we did ... well, to tell you the truth, I was kind of proud of those folks, Burkett says now, sitting at his kitchen table, hunched over a road atlas opened to a map of Mexico. Theyre doing for $8 a day what we were doing in Georgia for $11 an hour.

Understanding the quandary Douglas faces doesnt offer much solace, however.

Nor does it stop the situation from getting worse, as it did on June 30, when Tecumseh Product Co. closed its Douglas plant _ one lured here just seven years ago, where workers were frequently told that the quality of the small engines they built was so good that customers insisted on Douglas-made products.

The angst over lost manufacturing jobs is shared by rural communities across the United States. Many of the very towns that benefited from a rebound in manufacturing during the 1990s that helped them net thousands of new jobs, have now shuddered through three years of wrenching layoffs and plant closures.

All face more or less the same conundrum as people here in Douglas: What do we do next?

I wish I had jobs to offer for all my students. But Ill be honest, fellas, I dont, says George Foster, a former worker at a now-shuttered factory, addressing a class comprising mostly layoff casualties newly arrived for retraining at East Central Technical College in Douglas.

I dont know the answers. I wish I did, Foster says later, pacing through the workshop where he teaches refrigeration and air conditioning repair. I wish I did.

___

Of the 2.7 million jobs the U.S. economy has lost since early 2001, 2.4 million were in manufacturing. The downturn has been particularly tough on some rural communities, which have lost a significantly larger share of manufacturing jobs than urban areas, often because of outright factory shutdowns rather than partial layoffs.

The downturn has eliminated more than one in 10 of the nations factory jobs. Its much more than just a statistic in places like Douglas, where rumors of companies about to be lost or gained seem nearly as frequent as the blue and white semitrailers that rumble nonstop in and out of the towns sprawling Wal-Mart distribution center.

Douglas, tucked into south Georgias piney flatwoods, is a city in name but a small town in character. Its a place where people shake their heads at the crowds and pace of Atlanta, four hours north, and point to their towns suitability for raising a family.

It boasts a tidy downtown aspiring to be a tourist stop and a busy commercial strip of chain restaurants and discount stores. More important, Douglas has seeded a crop of brick and aluminum factory buildings amid the worn grain elevators and whitewashed tobacco sheds that gave the town its start.

Many of the factory jobs here are relatively unskilled, tapping a labor force of which nearly half lack a high school diploma. When state and local officials held a job fair downtown in July, more than 1,700 jobseekers flocked in over four hours _ in a city with a population of 10,600.

What we need more than anything is just jobs, says Herbert Tanner, a 57-year-old engine assembly worker at Tecumseh. Tanner is losing not just his paycheck but the health insurance that, last year, picked up $58,000 in medical bills, mostly for cancer care.

What good is drawing industry here if theyre just going to stay three or four years and leave us flat? he asked.

___

Douglas long depended on its role as a tobacco, peanut and cotton center, as well as on some apparel plants, now mostly closed.

About 20 years ago, some local bankers decided the town couldnt sit still. Douglas future would be made by aggressively pursuing new industries and training residents to fit the jobs.

The strategy worked. For a while.

The community pitched a cheap and willing nonunion work force, job training programs, incentives like tax breaks and ready-built, cinderblock factory buildings waiting for occupancy.

The first gains came in the early 1980s, when poultry processor Gold-Kist brought 1,500 jobs. Not long after, PCC Airfoils Inc. was lured here to make aircraft parts.

The town built its first speculative factory shell in the mid-1980s and Intermetro moved in. A second building was snapped up in 1995 by Tecumseh, a Michigan-based manufacturer whose engines supply the heart of Toro lawn mowers.

Tecumseh offered starting pay of around $8 an hour, generous health insurance and a chance to advance.

For around here, thats good money, said Maryland Winters, a former supervisor who got a raise to $12.13 an hour shortly before the shutdown. Youre not going to find something else like that even if you go uptown and put on your pretty heels and go to some office.

Douglas last year moved ahead with long-contemplated plans for a third building, in an industrial park on the west side of town whose only businesses are a commercial greenhouse and a mini-sports park.

If you build it, they will come, the weekly Coffee County News trumpeted hopefully atop its front page in late June, when completion was imminent.

Theres a problem, though. Both of the earlier buildings, and several others around town, are sitting idle.

Intermetro closed in January 2002, laying off the last 112 people from a payroll that had once been near 200.

Manufactured housing producer Fleetwood Homes closed one of its several area plants the same month, eliminating 120 jobs. In December, Owens Corning Fabricating Solutions, known locally as Fabwell, closed and sent its 130 workers home.

Some remaining businesses have also shed jobs. PCC has cut 283 in two layoffs since last spring.

But the damage was relatively limited. Until a Friday morning in early April.

___

They told us the day before we were going to have a plantwide meeting, says Rhonda Pease, a 32-year-old mother of two who worked on the engine line at Tecumseh, and whose husband worked in diecasting. They told us to be on time.

Close to 300 gathered in the open space of the shipping and receiving department that morning,


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government; US: Georgia
KEYWORDS: cafta; ftaa; globalism; nafta; thebusheconomy
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To: independentmind
Did I not explain to the other poster what you were implying by your comment? You are transparent.
61 posted on 08/10/2003 5:48:04 PM PDT by ItisaReligionofPeace ((the original))
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To: ItisaReligionofPeace
You most certainly did. I was implying what you suggest. And based on my own experience, I'm not sure my original idea was wrong. I am, however willing to consider that possibility, but you are not doing a very good job of convincing me.
62 posted on 08/10/2003 5:53:01 PM PDT by independentmind
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To: independentmind
I don't really care if I've convinced you or not. No doubt there are still people in this country with anti-Catholic sentiment. I would argue that based on the history of the Catholic church, it is no wonder there is no love lost between certain groups and the Catholic church.
63 posted on 08/10/2003 7:58:57 PM PDT by ItisaReligionofPeace ((the original))
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To: independentmind
BTW, go back and read the line that you originally excerpted. I think most Americans would find the idea of work being stopped so a religous figure could bless the machinery to be of interest. I don't necessarily think most people would act negatively towards it, but would definitely find it unusual.
64 posted on 08/10/2003 8:01:35 PM PDT by ItisaReligionofPeace ((the original))
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To: Willie Green
bump
65 posted on 08/10/2003 8:06:18 PM PDT by foreverfree
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