JACKSON,
Ohio — After 30 years at a factory making truck parts, Jeffrey Evans was earning
$14.55 an hour in what he called “one of the better-paying jobs in the area.”
Wearing a Harley-Davidson cap, a bittersweet reminder of crushed dreams, he
recently described how astonished and betrayed he felt when the plant was shut
down in August after a labor dispute. Despite sporadic construction work, Mr.
Evans has seen his income reduced by half.
So he was astonished yet again to find himself, at age 49, selling off his
cherished Harley and most of his apartment furniture and moving in with his
mother.
Middle-aged men moving in with parents, wives taking two jobs, veteran workers
taking overnight shifts at half their former pay, families moving West — these
are signs of the turmoil and stresses emerging in the little towns and backwoods
mobile homes of southeast Ohio, where dozens of factories and several coal mines
have closed over the last decade, and small businesses are giving way to big-box
retailers and fast-food outlets.
Here, where the northern swells of the Appalachians lap the southern fringe of
the Rust Belt, thousands of people who long had tough but sustainable lives are
being wrenched into the working poor.
The region presents an acute example of trends affecting many parts of Ohio,
Michigan and other pockets of the Midwest.
Slammed by the continued decline in the automobile and steel businesses, Ohio
never recovered from the recession of 2001-2, and blue-collar families who had
made it partway up the economic ladder find themselves slipping back, with
chaotic effects on families and dreams.
Throughout the state, the percentage of families living below the poverty line —
just over $20,000 for a family of four last year — rose slightly from 14 percent
in 2005 to 16 percent in 2007, one study found. But equally striking is the rise
in younger working families struggling above that line. The numbers are more
dismal in the southeastern Appalachian part of the state, where 32 percent of
families lived below the poverty line in 2007, according to the study, and 56
percent lived with incomes less than $40,000 for a family of four.
“These younger workers should be the backbone of the economy,” said Shiloh
Turner, study director for the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, which
conducted the surveys. But in parts of Ohio, Ms. Turner said, half or more “are
barely making ends meet.”
One consequence is an upending of the traditional pattern, in which middle-aged
children take in an elderly parent. As $15-an-hour factory jobs are replaced by
$7- or $8-an-hour retail jobs, more men in their 30s and 40s are moving in with
their parents or grandparents, said Cheryl Thiessen, the director of
Jackson/Vinton Community Action, which runs medical, fuel and other aid programs
in Jackson and Vinton Counties.
Other unemployed or low-wage workers, some with families, find themselves
staying with one relative after another, Ms. Thiessen said, serially wearing out
their welcome.
“A lot of major employers have left, and the town is drying up,” Ms. Thiessen
said of Jackson. “We’re starting to lose small shops, too — Hallmark, the
jewelry and shoe stores, the movie theater and most of the grocery stores.”
Shari Joos, 45, a married mother of four boys in nearby Wellston, said, “If you
don’t work at Wal-Mart, the only job you can get around here is in fast food.”
Between her husband’s factory job and her intermittent work, they made $30,000 a
year in the best of times, Mrs. Joos said. Since last fall, when her husband was
laid off by the Merillat cabinet factory, which downsized to one shift a day
from three, keeping anywhere near that income required Mrs. Joos to take a
second job. She works at a school cafeteria each weekday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m
and then drives to Wal-Mart, where she relaxes in her car before starting her
2-to-10 p.m. shift at the deli counter.
Her 20-year-old son went to college for two years, earning an associate degree
in information science, but cannot find any jobs nearby. He still works at
McDonald’s and lives at home as he ponders whether to move to a distant city, as
most local college graduates must. Her 22-year-old son works at Burger King and
lives with his grandparents — “that was his way of moving out,” Mrs. Joos said.
In late December her husband landed a new job, driving a fork lift at a Wal-Mart
distribution center, a shift that ends at 2:30 a.m. It pays a little less than
he used to make and is an hour’s drive away, so gasoline soaks up a painful
share of his wages.
“We never see each other,” Mrs. Joos, 45, said on a recent morning as she packed
a roast beef and cheese sandwich for her evening meal. “We never even think of
taking a vacation.”
Luckily they had paid off their mobile home and an addition they built.
As experienced men in this corner of Ohio have found themselves working for
lower wages, others feel they must move.
“I’m ain’t going to work for no $8 an hour!” said Lindsey Webb, 52, who, like
Mr. Evans, was one of hundreds laid off when Meridian Automotive Systems closed
its local plant. On a recent night, Mr. Webb was helping out in a trailer in
front of the old factory, a vigil by the United Steelworkers Union to remind the
company of its obligations to former workers.
Mr. Webb, who worked at the plant for 33 years, made more than $16 an hour doing
machine maintenance. Now he is thinking of moving to Arizona, taking along his
elderly father, whom he helps care for.
Darrel McKenzie, 44, was also a maintenance man at Meridian and grossed more
than $60,000 a year. Now he has restarted at the bottom as a union pipe-fitting
apprentice and expects to make $20,000 this year. His family just “does less,”
Mr. McKenzie said.
Mr. Evans said that moving back into the home where he grew up, after decades of
independence, was a stinging reminder that “I lost everything I worked for all
my life.”
His mother, Shirley Sheline, 73, had worked 28 years at the same auto parts
plant, and shares his dismay. “Can you believe it, a grown man forced to move
back with his mother,” she said.
Seeing his desperation last year, she added a room to her house with a separate
door.
“I don’t know what I’d have done without my mom,” Mr. Evans said. “At least I
can help her, or if I get back on my feet, she can rent it out.”
By contrast, selling his Harley, which he would have paid off this year, was
pure torture. He had owned a Harley since he was 20, and weekend cruising with
pals was his favorite recreation.
“The buyer said he wanted to take it away in the back of a trailer,” Mr. Evans
recalled, “and I said, ‘That won’t happen.’ ”
“Instead I drove it to his house, threw him the keys, came home and got drunk.”
With the
spread of automation, the machine controller is replacing the machine operator,
and much work that used to be done on the factory floor is moving to the office.
This will make for changes in the next generation of trade unionism, and unless
the unions are prepared for change, many wage-earners may see little point in
joining.
In his chairman's address to the National Union of General and Munici pal
Workers yesterday Mr Bernard Swindell wisely called for a special effort to make
trade unionism attractive to non-manual workers.
Already two out of every five wage-earners are non-manual workers, and this
proportion is bound to increase. "All too often," Mr Swindell observed, "the
change to non-manual work is accompanied by a change in political and social
outlook, and the development of an erroneous assumption that trade unionism is
not necessary."
Against the immense concentrations of financial power required to employ him,
the individual wage-earner is probably weaker than at any time in history, and
the need for the collective security that trade unions provide is as great as it
ever was.
But education and rising living standards all round are breaking down, happily,
the barriers between employers and employed. The class solidarity on which
nineteenth-century trade unionism was built seems increasingly irrelevant as the
boundaries between classes become less distinct.
Women have never been as ready to join trade unions as men, and, as more of what
used to be factory jobs are done by women in pleasant offices, the unions will
lose strength unless they can convince women that trade unionism is of personal
importance to them.
This is not likely to be achieved by strikes. Economic security today depends on
a host of things outside the control of an individual company or industry. The
battle may be age-old, but the unions need new weapons and a new strategy to
protect their members. And they must accept that their members — and potential
members — have new interests to be protected.
Light in Dark
Places . Thirty-six council roadworks foremen yesterday started a lecture course
at Ashington Technical College, Northumberland, intended partly to teach them
how to handle people who watch them digging holes. Each course, believed be the
first of its kind in Britain, will last five days with new batches of foremen
taking part throughout the summer.
Mr Edward Allen, assistant head of the building department said, "Road digging
isn't just sweat. It's a science carried out at ratepayers expense."
Increased mechanisation in Kent
and rising living
standards in London
brought to an end the annual summer influx
of East Enders
working on the hop harvest
THE ANNUAL migration from the East End of London to the
hop-fields of Kent has begun. Since the weekend a steady procession of family
parties has been seen at London Bridge Station, while yesterday the train
company added a special morning train from St Paul’s Station. Those who travel
by night trains — on Monday evening 1,700 persons left London — obtain the
concession of reduced fares and free transport for their luggage. This is an
important item to the hop- pickers, for many of them apparently transfer a
generous part of their household possessions to their temporary quarters.
It was noticed yesterday that, heterogeneous as were the
collections of goods, there was one article common to all — the perambulator.
There were perambulators of all shapes and sizes. There were hundreds of
children, but the children walked, while the go-carts, bassinettes, and prams
were heaped high with blankets, tin boxes and bundles of clothes. In several
cases the high pile was crowned by a tin bath. The hop-pickers who left
yesterday appeared to be in the highest spirits, looking upon the expedition in
the light of a holiday.
It is expected that the yield of the crops will be well below
the average, for attacks of aphids have been severe this winter, and continuous
washing has been necessary. It is pointed out that the crop would be much
greater if the Controller were to allow the growers to pick all they grow. The
limitation on the quantity of hops which a grower can sell is felt to be a great
hardship.
