Don’t bother talking up the virtues of free trade at Huckleberry’s, a favorite local watering hole where hundreds of customers have begun scribbling their anger toward trade policy on place mats as they wait for barbecued ribs and fried egg sandwiches.
“Send Bush to Mars. We need jobs here, not Mexico,” wrote Patricia McCook.
“The economy isn’t improving, Mr. President. It’s moving to Mexico,” added Teresa Martin.
“Soon to be unemployed. Won’t vote for you again,” read another remark from a stack of place mats that soon will be delivered to the White House.
The anger stems from a decision in mid-January to shut the Electrolux refrigerator plant, the largest employer and mainstay in this handsome city of 8,000 people in west-central Michigan, and ship nearly all of the 2,700 jobs to Mexico, where employees will be paid about one-tenth what they are here.
And last week Federal Mogul, the second-largest employer, threatened it will either close or move to Mexico its 310-employee ball bearing plant unless unionized employees give “true concessions.”
This is the real-life opening act of a few days of presidential politicking in Michigan, where Democratic candidates are pursuing the state’s 128 pledged convention delegates at Saturday’s Democratic caucus. Everyone runs on job creation. No one, it seems, has an answer to the relentless search for cheap labor.
Mike Huckleberry, who operates the restaurant bearing his name and collects the signed place mats every day, said, “Politicians say they don’t want us getting cheap drugs from Canada, but they don’t have any problem letting corporations chase cheap labor over the border.”
The frustration is growing, especially for those about to lose their jobs.
“Why should we keep busting our butts,” asks Jerry Cannon, a 39-year-old welder, so that Electrolux “can keep making buckets of money? . . . It’s corporate greed.”
Cannon will lose his $15-an-hour job when the plant closes next year.
“We have got companies closing, yet we are in Iraq and we can’t even find the reason we went over there,” he said.
Complaining about job losses is an old story in Michigan, especially in the auto industry-dominated southeast. But the effect of the world economy in growth-accustomed western Michigan has hit with a vengeance in the past year, and people in this area, where voting Republican is more of a birthright than a choice, seem helpless to stem the outflow of jobs.
Furniture and office goods manufacturers have cut back or left. The nation’s last Lifesavers candy producer shut down. An auto parts supplier announced this week it is moving 185 jobs to Mexico. A thousand jobs are leaving a spark plug producer. Closing the Electrolux refrigerator plant, which has been in this community for nearly a century, will wipe out 20 percent of Greenville’s tax revenue.
“The economic impact to the area is $243 million annually, and I think that’s on the low side,” said George Bosanic, Greenville’s city manager.
No one expects Republican-rich western Michigan to jump to what is viewed here as the dark side, the Democrats, but the anguish over job losses complicates the political calculus in this swing state.
NAFTA criticized
“We hear the White House say NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] is good for us. It may be good for Texas, but it’s not good for Michigan,” Huckleberry said. “People are angry and frustrated, and they wonder why they don’t hear anything from the federal level about why we’re losing these jobs. That’s because none of the elected officials want to talk about it.”
Michigan has lost more than 170,000 manufacturing jobs since 1999. The state and local governments offered AB Electrolux more than $70 million in tax incentives to stay in Greenville.
There is little evidence of a presidential campaign in Michigan. In the few days the candidates are here, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts will use his Vietnam War experience to appeal to the state’s estimated 900,000 military veterans. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean will try to rekindle the enthusiasm that, according to polls, gave him a big lead here only three weeks ago.
But as is often the case in Michigan, the economy is the top concern. Huckleberry said the drop in manufacturing jobs is not “a Democratic or Republican problem. It’s an American problem.”
There is no separating politics from the finger-pointing. Carl Dustin, executive editor of the family-owned Daily News, said he has received a heavy stream of angry letters to the editor in the past two weeks. They blame NAFTA, Electrolux and Bush, Dustin said.
Greenville, which is about 30 miles northeast of Grand Rapids, is a prosperous community. Fred Meijer started his grocery chain here. The Electrolux plant used to be known as Gibson Appliance, fondly recalled by residents as the workplace of their parents and grandparents.
Frightened clients
Joyce Brandes, who does the nails of many people connected to the plant, said folks are “scared.”
“I think there was a sense here that life would go on as it was,” said Dustin. Instead, people are losing jobs and NAFTA is to blame, he said.
David Bonior, a former Michigan congressman who is a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, said the warnings about free trade are coming true.
“Everybody–white collar and technology–thought they were immune. . . . There’s just an enormous hemorrhaging in this country,” he said.
Don Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said, “Governors and presidents can do virtually nothing about the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector” because market forces are so powerful.
Grimes said politicians can tinker with trade policy and possibly delay job losses, but the best they can do is ease the transition for those who have lost their jobs, through job training and health benefits.
Assigning blame is little comfort here because the Electrolux jobs will be gone, leaving a shaken sense of economic security.
Huckleberry said he hopes a replacement employer will move into the plant.
The place mats at his restaurant are printed with a defiant message: “Greenville is Bigger than Electrolux.” They are signed by “Huck.”
