The manufacturing industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs during the recession as plants have closed or scaled back. Places such as the southwest Missouri city of Lamar, tucked amid endless fields of winter wheat and soybeans, have seen the cornerstones of their economies disappear, leaving a gap that even billions in roadwork and government aid cannot fill.
Lamar began feeling the recession ahead of the rest of the country, when the furniture-maker O'Sullivan Industries closed its doors in mid-2007, immediately leaving 700 workers unemployed and turning its factory into a million-square-foot vacancy.
That began what city manager Lynn Calton calls ''a slow death.'' Stores folded. A 50-year-old car dealership went under. One in 10 jobs disappeared last year. Everyone suffered, from the downtown florist to the dentist who cleaned the factory workers' teeth.
Even Mayor Keith Divine filed for unemployment when his furniture store went out of business. He now sells carpet and mattresses and says he hasn't seen evidence of the 650,000 jobs saved or created nationwide thanks to the $787 billion stimulus.
''What work? Where?'' Divine asks.
For the Obama administration, Lamar is as much a problem of expectations as it is of policy. For all the items contained in the stimulus, from tax cuts to road work to new schools, nothing could quickly replace what factory towns like Lamar had lost.
That's why the White House says it's unfair to judge the stimulus by the unemployment rate because no amount of stimulus was going to keep Lamar's unemployment rate from approaching 12 percent.
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(Randy Turner's new book, Newspaper Days, is available at Amazon.com.)
1 comment:
My son couldn't buy a job if he had the money to. He can get food stamps though and thats it, his wife has left him with to kids.
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