325 Dreams Shattered by Plant Closing : Shutdown of Glass Factory Deals Pomona Another Blow
For almost 50 years, the Owens-Brockway glass factory in a gritty section of Pomona has kept 325 workers in skilled manufacturing jobs paying between $11 and $20 an hour.
Families were reared on those wages. They put children through college. Bought suburban homes and lived the American Dream.
But that dream dies on Thursday when the workers will hang up their hats for the last time and the plant will close. It is the latest of a string of economic jolts to Pomona, a city that stands as an exception to the general prosperity of the San Gabriel Valley.
The low-income, mainly minority city of 150,000 people has already been hit hard by the recession.
In 1992, Hughes Missile Systems Co. left Pomona for Tucson, Ariz., taking with it 2,000 aerospace jobs. The year before that, FMC Sweepers, which made street-cleaning vehicles, closed its aging Pomona factory and eliminated more than 100 skilled manufacturing jobs.
“This is a blow in a series of continuing blows,” said Todd Hooks, project manager with Pomona’s Economic Development Department. “We’re a poorer community that has an older industrial base, and this is shocking and disheartening.”
For the most part, the disappearing jobs are being replaced by low-wage spots in services and warehouse distribution, say city officials, who have had little luck at attracting new businesses to boost the manufacturing base and stimulate the economy.
City officials predict that ripples from the Pomona plant closure will be felt throughout the region. Workers plowed much of the factory’s $13-million annual payroll back into the local economy. Now, some laid-off employees may be forced to sell their homes and see new cars repossessed.
Local trucking firms, restaurants and ancillary businesses that served the plant, which was open around the clock, are also bracing for a decline.
“Anything that closes around here is going to hurt us,” said Chris Halkidis, who manages Tom’s No. 18 hamburger stand, where Owens-Brockway employees frequently dined.
Hooks says the city was caught off guard by the plant closure and must do a better job communicating with business if it intends to remain economically viable.
Hooks says he worries that the glass plant closure will only reinforce Pomona’s “negative image” as a decaying, crime-infested suburb. The fourth-largest city in Los Angeles County, Pomona had 40 murders last year. Its crime rate is the highest in the San Gabriel Valley. Almost 12% of its residents are unemployed--among the highest jobless rates in the county.
In general, the San Gabriel Valley has weathered the recession better than the rest of Los Angeles County and stands to outperform it in the years to come. The region has fewer aerospace and defense-related industries and has a large concentration of industries expected to do well in the future: health care, services, construction, retail and light manufacturing.
But Pomona remains a stubborn pocket of social and economic woes, and urban experts say the glass plant’s closure will only exacerbate its problems.
“The Pomona situation is a very acute one because there’s a historic interaction between plant closures and neighborhood decline . . .,” said Mike Davis, author of “City of Quartz,” a socioeconomic study of Los Angeles. “There’s no way Pomona’s going to get out of that situation if its industrial base continues to erode.”
An influx of Latinos and Asians into Pomona in recent years has sparked a mini-boom in small ethnic and family-run businesses, but they operate on tight margins and do not begin to replace the unionized jobs of a generation ago.
Meanwhile, although there are hopeful pockets of revitalization, downtown Pomona is studded with empty lots and boarded-up storefronts. Large swatches of the industrial area near railroad tracks are vacant. Along these desolate strips, teen-age girls push baby carriages.
Strapped for cash and facing a $4.5 million budget deficit, the city is pursuing controversial plans to open two card club casinos, which could bring $10 million a year in tax revenues.
The economic situation is so dire that the city is starting up its own version of a micro-enterprise loan fund popular in the Third World. The cooperative will give Pomona women small loans of up to $500 to start businesses.
It is a far cry from 1947, when the glass plant opened in Pomona. Then it was a mostly white community known as “Queen of the Citrus Belt” because of its many orchards. The community was flush with post-war prosperity, peace and optimism.
For generations, the plant boomed, with up to 700 workers during peak seasons who earned union wages, wide-ranging benefits and generous pensions.
In the heyday of glass in the late 1970s, there were 150 glass container plants scattered throughout the United States. But about that time, plastics arrived in a big way: The plastics industry introduced a two-liter soft-drink bottle that began competing with glass.
The fallout in the glass industry was swift and catastrophic. As food and beverage manufacturers switched to plastic, which is lighter, less breakable and easier to handle, plants were forced to close. Today about 70 glass container plants remain, and some of those may be teetering. In short order, analysts expect, plastic will eat further into the small-container soft-drink market.
“People are scared,” says Ron Clipper, a 26-year-veteran of the Pomona plant. “I’m 49 years old and I make almost $20 an hour. I’m willing to move anywhere in the country. But the jobs just aren’t there. This is a dinosaur, a dying industry.”
For the 325 Pomona employees who will be on the street come Christmas, placing the blame comes second to finding work. A union representative estimates that only 15 of the 325 workers will find comparable employment, and those will be highly skilled employees such as journeymen electricians and engineers.
Of 24 plant supervisors, only five will transfer to other Owens-Brockway plants around the country. Production manager Jim Woolstenhulme will be one of them, transferring to the company’s plant in Vernon southeast of Downtown Los Angeles.
Woolstenhulme lives with his family in Victorville, 86 miles from Vernon. With three daughters in school, the 42-year-old says it would be too difficult to uproot his family. So he may rent an apartment in Los Angeles during the work week.
“My wife’s very understanding,” Woolstenhulme said. “She realizes I have to go where the employment is.”
When Owens-Brockway announced the Pomona plant closure in October, it gave workers 90 days notice and explained that they would receive 25 hours pay for every year of employment, with a $15,000 cap. Workers took the news badly.
Some cried. Others got angry. Ron Clipper was supposed to buy a new car the night he got notification and says he was lucky to be able to back out of the deal. Leonard Gayles, 24, had just finished a 4,000-hour apprenticeship to become a journeyman machine operator when the news came. His skills won’t transfer easily to another industry.
Yet with just days to go before the plant shuts down, workers still retain pride in their craft. They boast to a visitor that the plant has met all its production quotas for this year. At the supermarket, they try to buy glass products, even though it’s getting harder to find.
They say there is something mesmerizing about a glass factory, where red-hot furnaces that burn at 2,800 degrees melt down silica sand, soda ash, recycled glass and limestone to create new glass.
Rows of synchronized machines pump the molten liquid into molds, which form a variety of food and beverage containers that chug along conveyor belts for quality control tests: Miller beer long-necked bottles (300 produced per minute), Snapple Iced Tea bottles (370 a minute) and others.
It is an enterprise that paid the bills for generations of families, including that of Essie Poole, who has been a glass packer at Owens for 15 years and got her son a job there as well. Poole, a 42-year-old single mother, just bought a car and wonders how she will make payments.
“I love my job. I raised my kids in this job. It’s part of my life and I wanted to retire here. But all I can do now is pray I’ll find a good job.”
