The Big Picture: Another Plant Closing In A City Near You

The new job numbers are out. The employment situation seems to be improving in May of 2010. The unemployment rate edged down to 9.7 percent.

Manufacturing employment increased by 29,000 over the month. Factory employment has risen by 126,000 over the past 5 months. Sounds encouraging doesn’t it? (Or maybe misleading…)

Despite the short- lived rays of sunshine, the big picture is unchanging. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to process this. All it takes is some common sense and a good broadband connection. The jobs are leaving America at an unprecedented rate. Analysts predict that most of these  jobs will never come back.

Volkswagen will be adding 2,000 jobs in Tennessee, but approximately 51,400 jobs have gone to China from 2001 to 2008 (timesnews.net). But those figures are estimates, since nobody is really keeping score of  job losses. Not important I guess.

Black and Decker laid off 63 workers in South Jackson, Tennessee (June 3, 2010, Jackson Sun).

The Graco plant, which assembles child car seats, plans to close by the end of the year, leaving 155 jobless. The assembly plant in Macedonia, Ohio wants to move to Asia (June 3, 2010, Akron News Now).

To learn more and find out what America’s made of, please visit ManufactureThis.org.

Stanley’s Furniture plant closing will eliminate some 530 production jobs in the last quarter of this year. Stanley will source its adult line from plants in Southeast Asia (May 24, 2010, Furniture Today). Furniture plant closings hit Virginia hard.

Yep, and even the chocolate you eat may have been made in another country. After 23 years in Reading, Hershey is closing the plant today and moving production to a new factory it has built in Monterey, Mexico. Hershey says it will mean the loss of about 260 jobs in the southeastern Pennsylvania city (Feb. 20, 2009, Ohio.com). The plant also makes 5th Avenue and Zagnut candy bars and Jolly Rancher hard candies.

Polaris Company, until yesterday, had a plant in Osceola, Wisconsin. Polaris announced yesterday that it is closing the plant of 515 employees and moving it to Mexico. Polaris calls the move re-alignment (May 21, 2010, ResistNet.com).

Innumerable plants are closing and sending valuable  jobs abroad. So what we are really facing in the United States is a jobless era. Joblessness in America is here to stay, like it or not. It is transforming the attitudes of our youth today and will affect the generation of tomorrow (theatlantic.com).

The death of manufacturing will surely have a long term effect on America and will probably be a scourge to its citizens. While free traders will try to justify that globalization is good and more products can be purchased cheaper than ever, these luxuries will come at a heavy price to the American worker.

As multinational corporations benefit from increases in profits, Americans will become poorer in the long run. Wages will decrease because of foreign competition. This is inevitable. Job insecurity has reached a whole new level since the jobs started being outsourced, several decades ago. The quality of the American worker has deteriorated because of high unemployment.

This current scenario has elevated poverty levels in the United States. The blue collar worker is more vulnerable than ever. Try telling a discouraged worker that has been unemployed for months, that the economy needs to diversify. Good luck with that.

As the blame game gets shifted to both political parties in America, the anti-incumbent mood is predominate, and has been underestimated in Washington, D.C. Americans are very angry about the lack of results and the arrogancy of politicians. You think the high unemployment rate could be a factor?

Terms that come to mind on election day – modernize, diversify, and re-alignment…