I grew up in the Rust belt. My earliest memories were of everyone's dad working at the Chrysler, Westinghouse or International Harvester plant. The middle class was open to everyone. Even the clerks at the local Sears store had full medical and paid retirement benefits. Everyone had a job.
But in the early 70's that changed. All the local manufacturing facilities started to slowly bleed jobs (punctuated by mass layoffs). The vast majority of these workers would never find a job with equivalent wages/benefits again in their lifetime.
In my High School years I remember at least three local suicides where the Father of a family came home after a layoff and murdered his family before taking his own life. At the time I couldn't understand it. But now I see it as an act of resignation by someone who realizes that they of no value to the future economy (and by extension, the community).
While Washington rends its hair and gnashes its teeth over the bailout of the Financial industry, I implore all of you to read a heartbreaking article by Richard McCormack. Richard is the editor of Manufacturing news, and has been in the Manufacturing sector his whole career. One of the key passages:
The heroic men running companies that made durable goods wept on the phone when I called to ask about why they closed their factory after it had been in operation for 80 years or more.
These people were not selling financial paper or making products that were obsolete and no longer in demand, like buggy whips. And yet when I speak with economists about manufacturing, they invariably rationalize the loss of America's wealth-generating sector by claiming the companies that are dying are making "buggy whips." It is wrong and it is infuriating. We're talking about the United States economy, which has just suffered a massive financial heart attack.
I remember writing about the manufacturing job situation in early 2004. It was the 35th consecutive month of manufacturing employment layoffs, with the latest BLS figure coming in at 135,000 production workers being told to go home and not ever come back. This was a crisis. I wondered why in the hell not a single person in the Bush administration and only a handful of people in Congress cared about the collapse of the wealth-generating sector of the American economy. As is happening with the financial sector today, manufacturing five years ago was being disassembled in front of their eyes. There were no bailouts -- manufacturers weren't looking for them -- there weren't even bromides.
I remember thinking as Bush invaded Iraq that it was America's last great hurrah. As America's military hardware was being shipped to the Middle East, America's industrial base was being shipped in the opposite direction to China. The war was happening at the same time that "outsourcing" became a big story in the media. But the business press got bored and started covering the incredible run-up of housing prices. "Whoopee," said all the journalists and economists. "Who needs industry when we've got finance and housing!"
But the manufacturing industry's plight continued. I wanted to rename my publication "One Outrage After Another." I was constantly questioning whether I should continue writing all the stories of companies dying, of industries leaving, of workers being laid off, of trade deficits skyrocketing, of China cheating, of the perverse reaction among Washington elites to rationalize the destruction. I wondered if I was the problem. If being Irish meant fixating on the negative. But I had covered manufacturing through the 1990s, and the story wasn't depressing. I even wrote a book about U.S. companies' adoption of the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing and the good it was doing. It was not me. It was the story that could not be ignored.
I got to know other people who couldn't sleep at night fretting over what was happening to the United States industrial base. These were patriotic people who started to coalesce around these issues, who were utterly perplexed by the federal government's total unwillingness to act on behalf of American producers and their workers.
The government knew what was going on. But its political appointees made nonsensical ideological arguments concerning "free trade" and "free markets." "We've got a war going on, we can't support U.S. manufacturing" was a refrain I heard over and again by political appointees at the "Commerce" Department and White House.
I strongly urge everyone to read the article in full.