‘One day your job is gone’
WASHINGTON — Three weeks ago, Dawn Zimmer became a statistic.
Laid off from her job assembling trucks at Freightliner’s plant in Portland, Ore., she and 800 of her colleagues joined a long line of U.S. manufacturing workers who have lost jobs in recent years. A total of 3.2 million — one in six factory jobs — have disappeared since the start of 2000.
Many people believe those jobs will never come back.
“They are building a multimillion-dollar plant in Mexico and they are going to build the Freightliners down there. They came in and videotaped us at work so they could train the Mexican workers,” said Zimmer, 55, who had worked at Freightliner since 1994.
That’s the issue for American workers. Many of their jobs are moving overseas, to Mexico and China and elsewhere.
Just ask Tom Riegel.
He worked for 27 years making Pennsylvania House furniture at a factory in Lewisburg, Pa., until the plant shut down in December 2004. The production was moved to a plant in China, which kept making the furniture under the Pennsylvania House label for shipment back to the United States.
Rigel, 48, who has had health problems, hasn’t worked since he lost his job running a molding machine. He says his prospects aren’t good given the number of other furniture plants in the area that have suffered layoffs.
“It started with just a few pieces of furniture made in China. Then it snowballed,” he said. “Manufacturing was built on the back of the American worker and then boom — one day your job is gone.”
Even though manufacturing jobs have been declining, the country is enjoying the lowest average unemployment rates of the past four decades. The reason: the growth in the service industries — everything from hotel chambermaids to skilled heart surgeons.
Eighty-four percent of Americans in the labor force are employed in service jobs, up from 81 percent in 2000. The sector has added 8.78 million jobs since the beginning of 2000.
Although these workers have been largely sheltered from the global forces that have hit manufacturing, that could change as satellites and fiber optic cable drive down the cost of long-distance communication. Today it is call centers in India and the Philippines but tomorrow many more U.S. jobs could move off shore.
Some economists say the United States is experiencing a normal economic evolution from farms to factories and now to service jobs.
“Every advanced economy has seen its employment in agriculture and manufacturing decline relative to services and America is no exception,” said Daniel Griswold, an economist at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank.
But others note that the loss in manufacturing jobs has been accelerating in recent years as the trade deficit has grown and America imports more and more products that used to be made here.
“It is pretty crystal clear to our members that when their plant closes down, they know where their jobs are going,” said Thea Lee, policy director at the AFL-CIO.