Smith had been pulled out of her training midsession in March 2002 to be told that her job had disappeared as part of the heavy-equipment manufacturing company’s reduction in forces. “I literally started shaking,” says Smith, a 40-year-old mother of two teenage sons. Within hours, she’d cleaned out her desk and bid goodbye to the workers on the assembly line she’d supervised for more than four years.
At first, Smith tried to remain optimistic; she had years of production-line experience (she’d also worked at the nearby Chrysler plant) and had risen though the ranks to management. For several weeks, she drove back to the Springfield plant three days a week to spend hours in a makeshift employment center working on her resume and looking for jobs online. “But there weren’t any,” she sighs.
Ohio has lost 244,000 jobs since 1999; almost 200,000 of them in manufacturing. In the Dayton metropolitan area, where Smith worked, one quarter of the manufacturing jobs have disappeared since late 1999, says Wesley Wells, executive director of the AFL-CIO Regional Council in Dayton. Unlike past reductions though, many of the jobs being cut now are not being replaced–they’re being moved to places where labor is cheaper, from Brazil to Bangalore. And it’s not just manufacturing work being outsourced, but white-collar jobs in IT and management, as well.
“For us in Ohio, it hasn’t been so much a jobless [economic] recovery as a job-loss recovery,” says Richard Stock, director of the University of Dayton Business Research Group. “I’m just hoping that we’ll get back half of the jobs we’ve lost. This is a critical issue in Ohio.”
Job creation and retention is also, of course, one of the biggest issues in this year’s presidential election. “The concern about jobs might take a different shape in some states where manufacturing is not the largest component of the economy, but in general, the lack of well-paying, stable jobs with health benefits is really a national issue,” says Robert Adams, a Wright State University political scientist who studies election trends.
Presidential candidates are paying particular attention to Ohio, though, and it’s 20 electoral votes because it is considered a bellwether state and because of its past record in determining who wins the nation’s top post. No Republican candidate has ever lost Ohio and won the presidency, and only two Democratic presidents–Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy–have lost in Ohio but won the national election. “Ohio is widely regarded as a representative sample of the country,” says Adams. “They [the candidates] don’t dare tempt fate.”
This week, both John Kerry and John Edwards campaigned in Ohio pledging to protect U.S. jobs as they toured manufacturing plants and visited union halls hoping to pick up votes before next Tuesday’s primary. President George W. Bush was there, as well. He won Ohio by just 3 percentage points in 2000–and has visited the state at least 14 times since he was elected. Pundits are calling the state “the new Florida.”
For now, Ohio residents split evenly on their opinion of Bush: In a recent University of Cincinnati poll, 49 percent approve of the job he’s doing while an equal number disapprove. But Bush’s ratings for his handling of the economy are lower–only 40 percent of Ohioans approve of the job he’s doing. Similarly, the most recent NEWSWEEK poll shows just 41 percent of national respondents approve of the way Bush is handling the economy. In the same NEWSWEEK poll, Bush’s approval rating stood at 48 percent, with 52 percent saying they would not like to see him win another four years (43 percent would–an all-time poll low).
“Ohio provides a very nice snapshot of what the rest of the country is thinking,” says Eric Rademacher, codirector of public polling at the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. “You have a wide variety of viewpoints from extreme conservatism to extreme liberalism, a wide array of socioeconomic segments and of sectors. While the country generally votes a little less Republican than Ohio in elections, Ohio is still a very good indicator of who will win the presidency.” The state, for instance, passed a bill banning gay marriage this month that takes effect in May–the 38th state to do so. But Ohio’s congressional delegation seems split on whether to support Bush’s proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution making only marriage between a man and woman legal, with Democrats–and even some Republicans–opposed to such an amendment.
Democrats clearly want to keep the state’s voters focused on the economy. Kerry launched a “jobs tour” in Ohio this week, earning the endorsement last week of the AFL-CIO, which represents 13 million U.S. workers–despite some reservations about Kerry’s past positions. “We are disappointed that he voted for NAFTA, but he wasn’t the only one,” says the AFL-CIO’s Wells. He cites Kerry’s more recent pledges to review existing trade agreements and to force employers to give advance notice to employees whose jobs might move overseas.
Leslie Smith, the International Harvester manager, lost her job when the company set up another assembly plant in Mexico. Other regional manufacturing and management jobs have been outsourced to India or to nonunion plants in the South. The UAW Local 402, which represents union workers at the plant in Springfield where Smith worked, had as many as 5,500 active members in the 1980s. It now has less than 1,200 members actively working. Last year, 1,800 others were notified they would be laid off. “We have never encountered these types of figures in our history,” union president Charlie Bush said at the time.
And they’re not likely to get better anytime soon. “No one wants to hear bad news, but I look at the numbers and they don’t look good,” says Lucious Plant, workforce development coordinator for the Montgomery County Job Center in Dayton–the nation’s largest. “Some jobs that are going away aren’t being replaced–and these aren’t entry-level jobs we’re talking about. In the short term, this is going to be really painful.” In 1999, the Job Center’s six recruitment liaisons helped fill 2,000 job openings. Last year, there were only half as many positions for a growing pool of job seekers. About 64,000 people were registered with the Job Bank last month as looking for work.
“We’ve really shifted gears from recruitment to placement,” says David Snipes, former manager of the Job Bank. Since December, Snipes says the center has learned of 1,500 planned job cuts. “That’s what we already know of, and that’s just in a couple of months,” he says. Worse, he says the increase in unemployment has been accompanied by a decrease in pay for many residents of Montgomery County (which encompasses Dayton) who are employed. That’s in part because many of the jobs being advertised are in lower-paying sectors–like food service, retail and hospitality–than the jobs being cut.
Before she was laid off, Smith made more than $100,000 annually through overtime pay (she’d typically worked 13 to 14 hours a day, starting at 4 a.m., and often worked weekends, as well). But after a few months of sending out resumes with no responses, Smith was barely scraping by with her unemployment checks, and her husband, a truck driver, wasn’t able to make up the difference. She was forced to file bankruptcy. “We lost our house, my car,” Smith says, blinking back tears. “I just spent afternoons crying.”
Finally, about six months after she lost her job, Smith found another one, working first as a political strategist and then as executive assistant for the AFL-CIO Regional Council in Dayton. The job came with health insurance, but it also meant a “drastic cut” from the wages she’d become accustomed to at the International Harvester truck plant.
When Ron Duckett was laid off from the Delphi plant last year, he’d been making more than $10 an hour plus benefits as a production-line worker, manufacturing parts for Chevrolet cars and trucks. He’d taken the job just out of high school, while taking classes at Sinclair Community College. After he lost his job, Duckett was forced to move back home while he filled out applications for at least 50 local businesses, hoping to continue going to college after work to complete his degree. In September, he got his first and only call back–for a photo-lab technician job at Walgreens. “It’s four dollars an hour less than I was making, but they called me back,” said Duckett. He took the job.
Come November, Duckett and Smith are planning to vote in a new president with the hope that with a new administration will come new jobs and new restrictions on the exporting of other jobs. Adams says most Democrats who lost their jobs aren’t just party members, but union members, too. “That gives them a base,” he says. “It is a big deal.”
Indeed, the AFL-CIO’s Wells says labor represented about one in five votes in Ohio in the 2000 presidential election. Through voter outreach programs and volunteers, the union has a goal of increasing labor voter turnout in the state by at least 5 percent this year. In a state where Bush won by such a slim margin of victory last time and is now polling at new lows, that may make all the difference this fall.
