Requiem For My Hometown

[PitbullMidwest]

Well the economy continues to take its toll on my home town of Burlington, Iowa In the last 18 months our area has lost the majority of it's manufacturing base.

It started with JI Case who has whittled it's workforce from 1500 employes to just over 300, last month the crawler line was sent to Georgia reducing the workforce to those with hire dates prior to 1974. Next came the closing of Excide Battery, then Blue Bird school bus, then Maytag. GE cut over 90 jobs last week and then the biggest setback came yesterday, BNSF layed off the entire 2nd and 3rd shift from their locomotive maintenance shop and will probably close it by year's end. The news reported that the loss of the BNSF shop would yank $10,000,000 from the local economy.

Besides the economic loss, the closing of "The Shops" is a big blow to the proud history of our town, after all, we are the "Burlington" in Burlington Northern-Santa Fe.

Many, many friends lost their jobs yesterday, many others are already out of work and have nearly no prospect of finding another one locally. This is one economic turndown I'm not sure Burlington can bounce back from.

Well, sorry for such a doom and gloom post but I had to vent and I knew TBN would listen.

 

[dummy]

Listening and paying attention. How unfortunate for your friends and neighbors.

 

[Wingnut]

Wow ... requiem is the right word! That really is sad. The ripples from these huge layoffs and closures ends up affecting the entire pond ... I've been seeing the effects on Flint, Michigan on the news nightly. They've been affected by a combination of the Big Three and by bad government and it is very, very sad to see community halls, fire halls, and opera halls (amongst everything else) being closed down as the deficit is already 40+ million.
Wish I could say something encouraging ....

 

[Bird]

That really is scary; hope it turns out well for those folks who've lost their jobs.

 

[PitbullMidwest]

<font color=blue>That really is scary</font color=blue>

Kinda how I feel. All the places mentioned payed from $15-$30/ hour and even during slow times they were the anchors in town. The remaining factories top out at about $11/hr. and few if any are hiring. The one industry that is working overtime is the Iowa Army Ammunition plant (home of the TOW and Hellfire) and I'll let others decide whether that is a good thing or not, but to me that just makes it even the more scary.

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

I'm in Fort Wayne, IN and can tell you we've seen it all before. In and around 1980 International Harvestor Corporation closed the Scout line forever and moved all of it's medium duty and heavy duty truck production out of here to OH (they kept engineering/testing local) as the result of a year long UAW strike. At the same time another large employer vacated to IL. While GE maintained manufacturing here they had closed two of their local production plants and had more people laid off than lost their jobs with the IHC move. With that loss of manufacturing base many local trucking companies just closed their doors. Deregulation hit that industry at the same time and no one was making a living at that. Many, many truck terminals sat empty and boarded over.

The real estate market took a big nosedive, rental vacancies rose as people doubled up or moved in with relatives and, if you recall, interest rates climbed to an all time high (nothing to do with our local situation, but a factor to consider, nonetheless).

Here we are over two decades later and still on the map. We attracted a new GM assembly plant and some other suppliers to it to the area. The city has annexed some outlying areas. Municipal services seem solid. In recent years just three municipal renovation projects (two high schools and a public library) have totaled about $200,000,000.00. A huge addition to and a later renovation of our local coliseum aren't even included in that figure.

Now, again, we're faced with Dana moving out hundreds of jobs along with many other companies laying off hundreds. While that's certainly not good news here I'm convinced we'll once again weather the storm and come through again.

It's the attitude of the people living in the community that matters. Around the same time as all of this doom and gloom was going on we had a huge flooding problem here resulting from record snowfalls through the winter that never melted away until a rapid temperature change and torrential rains caused it all to melt at once.

National Guard troops were brought in to aid in the disaster, Even President Reagan came by to survey the situation. What he saw was school kids outnumbering troops almost 10-1 filling and carrying sandbags to build and reinforce dikes to save the homes of neighbors, friends and strangers.

We became known as 'the city that saved itself' as a result of those tireless efforts. I saw middle and high school kids literally soaked to the skin in ankle deep mud passing sandbags. I saw them filling nylon sandbags until their hands bled all the while never complaining. I drove a 15 yard dump truck hauling raw and bagged sand 91 hours stopping only for fuel, food, showers and dry changes of clothes. People were showing up with sandwiches, coffee and hot chocolate from all over.

That time could have marked a requiem for this town, but the people here refused to let it happen. Maybe it was that kind of adversity that brought this community together. I don't know. I do know that we'll survive this downturn like we have those in the past. I think that with the same attitude, you folks will, too. Don't look at it as a death knell. Look upon it as an opportunity to venture into other things. Probably the only thing I know about the Chinese language is the the word for 'problem' is the same word for 'opportunity.'

Sorry for being so longwinded. I hope the message was worth it.

 

[pajoube]

Well-said Gary, it seems these ups and downs occur on a cycle of 10 years in many industries.
PJ

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Sounds like things are not rosey all over. Here along the front range in Colorado, the IT industry is in shambles. This is the worst that I have seen it in my 27 years in the business. In Colorado Springs, mergers (HP and Compac) and wonderful/artistic accounting practices (Worldcom data and call center) resulted in huge job losses. Denver held a job fair and over 8200 people attended. Many of these folks have advanced technical degrees who are looking for anything with a paycheck. My company has not increased headcount in over 2 years. It seems that if you have a job right now, you are stuck in that spot for awhile. Unfortunately, management is demanding the same work output with less people and few cash outlays for new software tools. That means lots of overtime and less tractor time.

 

[frank_f15]

can feel the pain for your area, same thing here! the co i work for (31.5 years) at one time employed at 3 plants in the area about 3000 production workers and about 500 office staff, was world heardquarters. and over the last 15 years having gone global, we are down to about 200 total(most jobs went to mexico and texas. just last month they made the decision to close our operations, don't matter too much to me personally as i will work for at least 4 or 5 months or more, BUT i am 61 so i can slide into retirement with out much problem. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE YOUNGER FOLKS? U CAN GIVE BACK ALL KINDS OF CONSESSIONS, but hard to combat workers that make $50 a week or less with no benefits. but what the hell! at least our capital gain income won't be taxed./w3tcompact/icons/eyes.gif