Boom Times Elude Workers With Modest Education, Skills
Sherry Sutton is surprisingly upbeat for a single mother of two who makes $8.45 an hour and will lose her job just before Christmas.
Like the more than 300 other factory workers at the Huffy bicycle plant off Progress Drive, Sutton is convinced that she will land another job when Huffy bows to foreign competition and closes its last U.S. production facility Dec. 17. Her optimism is born of almost nine straight years of economic expansion.
But even the boom of the 1990s has its limits, especially for people who, like Sutton, have few skills and only a modest education.
Although the expansion has created almost 20 million jobs, most are not the kind of high-tech, high-profile positions that remake the lives of those who hold them. In fact, millions of them pay only a few notches above the minimum wage and offer little chance for advancement.
Meanwhile, Washington has embraced policies--such as overhauling welfare and scaling back job training--that have boosted the importance of having a job and increasingly left it to individuals to make their own economic way.
What this combination of trends means for Sutton is that she will probably end up working pretty much where she began. “I can get a new job, but I’m still going to be at the same place I was when I started to work,” she said one recent evening.
What it means for the nation is that the full employment now enjoyed by millions of lower-paid Americans could evaporate quickly if the economy stumbles, and the cost to people such as Sutton could be substantially higher than in the past.
“We’ve raised the stakes on getting a good job, but it’s a big question how durable the jobs are that people can get,” said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, the conservative Republican who represents Farmington in Congress and whose district has suffered five plant shutdowns since the start of the year.
Losing a job is nothing new for 34-year-old Sutton and the roughly 50 million other Americans who work for $10 an hour or less. It happened to her in the early 1990s when the country was coming out of a recession and the company that preceded Huffy at the Farmington plant, auto wiring maker FMA Corp., went bankrupt. That time around, she was out of work for six months. She had to collect food stamps and borrow from relatives to keep her car going. (She is proud that she did not try to collect child support from her children’s fathers. “They’d never been around,” she said, “and I didn’t want them jumping into my kids’ lives.”)
With cheap labor available overseas, the kinds of unskilled factory jobs that Sutton gets are some of the most insecure in America, with shorter periods of employment and greater chances of layoff than almost any other kind of work in the country. But for all that, they are not very different from many, perhaps most, of the positions being generated by today’s economy.
Despite the conventional wisdom that the economy is creating a generation of high-paid, high-tech jobs, six out of the top 10 job growth categories and more than half the new jobs in the coming decade are likely to be neither. A Labor Department study of work force trends found that many will be for such low-paying and uncertain positions as cashier, home health aide and receptionist.
And despite the widely held view that the steady growth of the 1990s is translating into increasingly stable employment, there are reasons to think it’s not. Government figures suggest that the percentage of workers who lose jobs to layoffs and closings is not falling at anything like the pace it did in previous expansions.
“Insecurity is a growing fact of life in the labor market,” said MIT economist Paul Osterman.
After six months of joblessness in the early 1990s, Sutton traded the insecurity of unemployment for that of a $6-an-hour job assembling majorette batons and can openers for Handicraft Co. in nearby Bonne Terre, Mo. It was more than a year before she made it back to the Progress Drive plant, by then occupied by Huffy, for what she thought was job security.
Good jobs have always been the Holy Grail of people and places trying to get ahead. And they have become ever more tantalizing as welfare reform has reduced public assistance and federal job training programs have failed to keep up with demand.
But Farmington’s courtship of Huffy illustrates how hard it can be to attract good jobs, even in good economic times.
This city of 12,000, an hour south of St. Louis, has a long history of self-help. During the Great Depression, it built a factory at community expense to attract Biltwell Pants Co. A few years later, it built a second factory to attract Trimfoot Shoes. When the prospect of landing Huffy presented itself in the early 1990s, the community jumped at the chance.
As a recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial put it, the city and state embraced Huffy “with open wallets,” providing $1.5 million in grants, $5 million in low-interest loans and $20 million in municipal bond financing. Huffy returned the favor with a torrent of new jobs--more than 800 at the peak--that helped lift both the local economy and people’s expectations.
Carol Holdman was 27 when the plant opened in September 1994, a forklift operator who had quit her previous job to have a second daughter. She and her husband, a union ironworker, agreed that she should go back to work so the couple could afford such luxuries as new TVs and a separate phone for their older daughter.
Glen Brewer was 48 and had been everything from a truck driver to an exercise equipment company manager. He and his wife, Pat, went to work for Huffy in early 1995. They bought a three-bedroom ranch house when Pat was promoted to supervisor in 1997. They bought a red Pontiac Firebird last year. “She thought she’d reached the pinnacle of her life with that car,” Brewer said recently.
Local Cooperation Proved to Be Futile
The community profited almost as grandly as the workers. The new jobs helped it afford a combination civic center and health club as well as a $3-million water park with pool, Disney-like entertainment and tanning decks.
Even after the initial glow of the plant’s opening wore off amid management changes and cutbacks, Farmington sought to ensure Huffy’s success. When the United Steelworkers of America tried to organize the plant in 1997, local businessmen underwrote a successful “Vote No” campaign. When the company needed to boost production, workers agreed to go on 10-hour shifts.
But the effort proved useless.
Huffy announced Sept. 27 that it had been undercut by cheap Chinese imports and was stuck with a huge backlog of bikes, including 160,000 in Farmington. It said it would close the plant and buy the bikes it needed overseas.
To many, Farmington’s unfortunate experience with Huffy may seem little more than a footnote to a powerful and otherwise positive trend: the global rearrangement of work and recasting of the U.S. as an idea economy.
Certainly, the winds of global change have blown hard here recently. Besides Huffy, the Biltwell Pants plant and the Trimfoot Shoe factory have also closed in recent months, both victims of foreign competition. Yet workers and officials alike remain convinced that new and better jobs are just around the corner.
“They’re going through a rough patch,” Missouri’s Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan said in an interview, “but that can get ironed out with a new employer.”
Still, the Huffy story has some disturbing aspects, even for outsiders.
For one, the plant’s short life suggests that the already-limited powers of communities to attract good jobs that otherwise would not come may be fading before the quickening pace and global play of economic events.
Trimfoot and Biltwell rewarded Farmington’s economic development program by staying five or six decades. Huffy, by contrast, announced its pullout just two weeks after passing the five-year mark on which its state and local aid had been conditioned. Thomas A. Frederick, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an interview that the firm did not know of the anniversary when it made the shutdown decision. It plans to pay back none of its aid.
For another, the jobs that will replace those being lost at Huffy are unlikely to be any higher paying or more secure. Farmington officials say most of the firms that have expressed interest in the Progress Drive plant would pay $6 to $8 an hour, slightly less than what most Huffy workers now earn. Carnahan insisted that with state help the community could do better and land $10-an-hour jobs. But officials subsequently acknowledged that the state has no real way of knowing the pay levels of the jobs it gains.
Finally, although virtually everyone agrees that education and training are the best routes of escape from the treadmill of low wages and unstable employment, most Huffy workers are unlikely to get much of either. Although they are eligible for a $360-million pool of federal education and training funds reserved for workers whose jobs are lost to foreign competition, so were the workers at Trimfoot and Biltwell--and most of them did not receive such aid.
Sutton, the single mother of two, said she sought training as a secretary the last time she was laid off, only to be told that the government wouldn’t pay because there was already an abundance of secretaries in the area. This time, she and Holdman said, they want to get computer training. But the one school they’ve approached offers a 26-week program, while the government says it will pay for only 13.
The training fund squeeze encountered by Sutton and Holdman should not be surprising. In after-inflation terms, the money that the federal government devotes to training has not budged in a decade. When the amount is measured against the growth of the economy, it has actually shrunk by close to one-third.
In the end, most Americans think that economic growth, not public programs such as training, is what improves people’s lives. And with the 1990s boom seemingly unstoppable, many have concluded that growth is inevitable. But with Christmas and the shutdown coming fast, the Huffy workers are taking precautions.
Sutton has canceled her daughter’s gym class. Holdman is scrambling to get her husband, who was laid off earlier this year, licensed as a truck driver so they will have some income. The Brewers have put their house and car up for sale.
For them, anything approaching permanent improvement will have to await the next job.
