William Woods, a 24-year veteran of Brach’s Confections, wasted no time getting ready for another career after the candy maker closed in 2003 and sent 1,100 jobs to Mexico. He went back to school and earned a degree in accounting, hoping to find work in that field. But Woods, one of more than 5,000 candy-industry workers in the Chicago area who have lost their jobs over the last 13 years, has had no luck in a tough job market despite his 4.0 grade point average and 10 years of part-time accounting work during the tax season. At 52, he has no pension, his unemployment benefits ran out long ago, the family’s health insurance costs $1,200 a month and the household is barely getting by on his wife’s paycheck. Meanwhile, he tries not to be bitter about his plight. “I understand the economics involved [in the closing],” he says. “But I think they left a lot of people hanging. There was this idea that we were going to be taken care of and they would help us find jobs.”
Make no mistake: Chicago is still sweet on candy makers. The Candy Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit, estimates that 100 candy companies remain in the metropolitan area, a mix of factories and small, specialty candy makers that together generate about $4 billion in annual revenue. They include Tootsie Roll Industries on South Cicero Avenue, M&M Mars (Milky Way and Snickers) on Oak Park Avenue and the Goelitz Confectionary Co. (Jelly Belly) in North Chicago.
But if Chicago is still the king of candy, it has lost some of its crown jewels. Brach’s was one of the two largest Chicago candy companies to close down their plants in the last two years. The other was Archibald Candy Corp., parent company of Fannie May, which shuttered its West Side factory in January 2004, laying off 500 factory workers and 125 office workers along with the sales force in its 228 retail stories. Before Brach’s closed here for good in December 2003 and idled 1,100 workers, it had already reduced its workforce by 2,800 between 1987 and 2001.
The exodus also includes Primrose Candy Co., which moved its factory to China last year after 73 years in Chicago; Marshall Field’s State Street candy kitchen, where its signature Frango Mints were made; Leaf Inc., which closed two plants in Chicago and began making its Whoppers, Milk Duds and Rain-Blo pops in Memphis and Downstate Robinson; and Ferrara Pan in Forest Park, makers of Jaw Busters and Atomic Fireballs, which shifted some of its production to Mexico and Canada.
What drove all these longtime candy makers from Chicago is mainly the high price of U.S.-produced sugar, which American plants are required to use, compared to prices that are two to three times lower elsewhere. The wide variation is caused by protectionist quotas that limit sugar imports into the U.S., a situation that could be eased under the Central American Free Trade Agreement under consideration in Congress.
Even though scores of candy companies are still in business here, there are not enough confection-related jobs to absorb all the thousands thrown back into the labor market with inadequate skills and age working against them. “They were veteran workers, very skilled.” says Dan Swinney, executive director of the Center for Labor and Community Research. “They were candy cooks and packagers and people who manage a specific type of machine. But they don’t have the transferable skills for equivalent jobs in another industry. They lack the computer, literacy and numeracy skills that are needed now, even for production jobs, because of robotics and advanced technology.”
About a third of the workers in the candy industry are Spanish-speaking and face additional obstacles. “They need to go back to school, brush up their skills and learn the language better,” says Patricia Bolivar, training coordinator for the Institute for Latino Progress. “But not many schools are going to be able to register them because first you need to speak English or else you have to take [language] classes. And if you don’t have a GED, you can’t get into city colleges either.” She said some Latinos even had to be sent to Spanish literacy classes. “You start finding out that a lot of people who were working for so many years came with only a 3rd-grade education in their own country.”
The general decline of manufacturing in the Chicago area has added to the difficulty for all these workers. “Chicago in the 1980s had 7,000 factories. It now has 3,000. That’s a loss of 4,000 factories and 200,000 basic manufacturing jobs,” Swinney says. “It’s absolutely difficult for a person who loses a job in these companies with their skill level and with their age to find a similar job.”
NO ONE KNOWS that better than Woods, who had three small children and was studying for his accounting degree when he began working at Brach’s massive Cicero Avenue plant in 1977. “My original intention was to go to school to show my kids it could be done,” he says.
Woods tended one of five huge machines that mixed and distributed formulas for various confections. Called starch moguls, they required a crew of 4 to 10 to lift the trays in and out and keep the machines supplied with starch. It was hot, sweaty work.
“It was just like if you were working in a textile plant,” Woods recalls. “There was a lot of starch dust in the air all the time.”
In 1990, Brach’s invested $30 million in new machines that would cut production costs in half. Woods was chosen to learn how to operate the new moguls and head one of the teams that would run the new equipment. “It was faster, much faster, and it produced more product,” he says. “It involved a lot of computer and statistical processing. Before, everything was manual.”
It also made his work a lot more pleasant. There were ergonomic lifts and hoppers that helped the workers move the heavy bags of sugar and starch. The machines were in an air-conditioned section of the plant. “It was very exciting for me,” he recalls. “We were doing things that were much less physical, and it was interesting because we were learning the new processes.”
Woods worked the first shift, from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m., which enabled him to be home with his family in the afternoons. He was making $17 an hour plus union benefits. Feeling secure in his job and seeing his children’s success in school, he soon set his own studies aside. “I didn’t see the need to continue,” he says. “My job gave me a false sense of security, and I didn’t have the desire to [go to school] any more.”
He was right about his children. His daughter now has a master’s degree in laboratory sciences and works at a hospital, and one of his sons teaches graphic design at the nationwide Westwood College. But he was wrong about the job security.
Woods wasn’t surprised when the rumors started. “I always read the newspaper, and there was the sugar crisis,” he says. “About a year or two before they closed, we’d see potential buyers come in and tour the place. Several of my colleagues left. They had opportunities to go to other companies and they took advantage of those. I looked; I put applications out there. But this age thing was working against me.”
In January 2001, the closure was announced. Brach’s hired a company to disassemble the moguls and move them to the new plants in Latin America. “My operation went to Mexico,” Woods says. “The hard candy went to Brazil.”
For six months, the company paid for his health insurance. He is now enrolled in the Illinois Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, which costs $1,200 a month. His wife, who is self-employed, is supporting him and his middle son’s three young children, ages 9, 8 and 4, who live with them.
He went back to school and got his associate’s degree in accounting at South Suburban College but found that employers were requiring bachelor’s degrees and one to two years’ experience in the field.
“I haven’t ruled out factory work,” he says. But many jobs in factories require that employees rotate shifts. “If I can get a one-shift job without a lot of physical stuff, I would. I’m trying to get out of starting at the bottom, at $7 or $8 an hour.”
He tries to stay positive about his hunt. “I have my days,” he says. “Sometimes I’m up, and sometimes I’m down. Thank God my wife’s working, but our disposable income is pretty much zip.”
WHEN THE FANNIE MAY FACTORY in the West Loop closed last year, it wasn’t the first time Tim Rosiak, 58, lost a job he’d held for two decades. Rosiak had put in 20 years at Southworks until the rash of steel-plant closings in the early 1980s. He was out of work for a year and a half before he landed a job on the dock at Fannie May, loading and unloading pallets of butter, starch, cocoa and candy.
After two years on the dock, Rosiak got a reprieve from the heavy lifting and spent the next five years working as a stock clerk in the flagship candy store next to the factory at 1137 W. Jackson Blvd. Then he moved onto the production line in the factory, where he and another worker lifted 200-pound tubs of cream that would be mixed with other ingredients and turned into Pixies, Meltaways, Trinidads and truffles.
“It was a lot harder than the steel mill,” he recalls. “It was a lot of physical work.”
He was making $15 an hour with bonuses, along with the generous benefits that his union job provided. It was, he thought, the job he would retire from. “My theory was always once I start some place, I’m going to stay there ’til the end.”
The end came sooner than Rosiak had planned. Fannie May always closed for two weeks in July. But July 2003 was different. “The first day we came back, the rumor was already out,” he recalls. By the time the impending closure was announced that December, the workers weren’t surprised. “The lump in my throat was already gone. By Christmas time, we already knew.”
Having been unemployed once, Rosiak knew the drill. He immediately began applying for jobs. He enrolled in a class in pneumatics, electronics and hydraulics at Daley College. Before he finished the 10-week class, he had a job offer at Tower Automotive, working as an operator at the end of an assembly line for car parts. “I was fortunate to have a job that quick,” he says.
These days he earns $10.84 an hour and is no longer in a union. He’s pleased to have his job, but he does think about what he lost.
“I never missed a day at Fannie May in 20 years,” he says. “But what do you get out of it? Nothing. They didn’t even want to give us our pensions. It hurts because you think you’re going to stay there.”
Rosiak hopes to work at Tower until he’s 65 and can retire, but he knows there are no guarantees that Tower will stay solvent, either. “Just because you have a product, that doesn’t mean everybody has to buy it,” he says.
WHEN JUAN MANUEL CABRALES applied to work at Brach’s in 1983, he had an inside track. “In that time, some of my family worked over there-my father, my uncles, one of my brothers-some people in there who help you to get the job,” he says.
For the next 20 years, Cabrales worked in various parts of the plant. Over time, he gained enough knowledge to work in the color and flavor lab, which was among the last areas of the plant to close. “You have to learn how to measure the amount of color, the amount of flavor, for each candy,” he says. “Most skills you learn on the job.”
Some of the work was physically challenging, some required concentration and precision, but Cabrales found it all satisfying, even the more menial tasks. “We make jelly beans, chocolates, it all depends on the day,” he says. “When they have [enough] jelly beans . . . they send us to make the chocolates. Or if not they send us to inspect, even to mop the floors. It all depends.
“And mostly the people [were] nice guys. As long as you do your job right, nobody bothered you. It’s all different kinds of people, and they’re like your family after so long.”
By 2003, he was making $14 an hour, and even though he did not belong to the union, he felt as secure in his job as anyone else. Then, on December 15, 2003, he was out of work.
Cabrales realized that he would need additional training to get a new job. “I went to Instituto Latino to see if I can get a career,” he says. He has been taking classes in technical skills as well as English at Wright College and hopes that he’ll eventually get a job as an electrician’s helper. But he knows it won’t be easy.
“You have to look for anything, for anything, start from the bottom,” he says.
He still receives unemployment benefits because he’s in school, but money is tight. Two of his four children, ages 12 and 15, live at home with Cabrales and his wife, who works as an inspector at a factory. “Lot of things you have to restrain yourself. You can’t do what you used to.”
He expects to finish school in two months and then his unemployment benefits will end. “Right now is a lot of pressure,” he says, “because we know that at the end we have to start looking for a job so that way when we finish school we have something to live on.”
CHIQUITA RICHMOND LOOKED FORWARD to going to work at the Fannie May store at 87th Street and South Kedzie Avenue. She put on her white shirt, black pants and red jacket with the Fannie May logo, kissed her daughter goodbye and caught the bus. Twenty minutes later, she arrived at the store, where she unlocked the door, turned on the lights, opened the safe and filled the registers. By the time the first customers filed in at 10 a.m., the Pixies and Mint Meltaways were stacked neatly in their trays and light gleamed off the shiny white counters.
“I really liked it. The people were nice-the customers and the people I worked with,” she says.
It was Richmond’s first job. After finishing high school, she had lived with her mother on the city’s South Side. By the time she was 23, she was pregnant. But shortly after her daughter was born, she landed her job at the candy store.
“I came to work every day,” she says of her three years at Fannie May. “I was never late and never called in sick. I took maybe one day off in three years. I guess I was just excited, and I thought that if I asked to take a day off, maybe I wouldn’t have a job.”
Her hard work was rewarded. She was hired at $5.15 per hour but was quickly raised to $5.65. When a new manager was hired in 2003, she told Richmond she would increase her hourly wage to $8.76. The timing was perfect. Richmond’s mother had become ill and had to leave her job. Richmond was trying to support her mother and her daughter.
But the Christmas 2003 season was slow. “Everybody worried about losing their jobs,” she recalls. “We didn’t get a big Christmas like they wanted.” Soon the manager announced that the store would close on Jan. 22, 2004.
“I stayed there until the day they closed the doors,” Richmond says. She helped clean the store and close it for the last time. “I think they said we could take the aprons, but no one wanted them. They were furious with the company.”
She had never gotten her raise.
For a year after that, she received unemployment checks. Then those ran out. She could no longer pay the bills, so she, her mother and her daughter moved in with relatives. The three of them now live on her mother’s disability checks while Richmond continues to look for work.
“But everybody’s saying the same thing,” she says. ” ‘We’re not hiring right now.’ I’ve been looking for jobs in sales, reception, filing. I’m willing to learn anything and try anything new.”
The only thing she has ruled out is returning to one of the Fannie May stores that have opened under the new owners, unless she gets a raise above the $5.65 she was earning when the store where she worked closed.
“I wouldn’t go back unless they paid me more than I was earning when I left them,” she says. “I think I deserve a little more than that. I was faithful to that company.”
