posted on October 30, 2006 04:26:43 AM new
As the Jobs Go South, the Hope Goes With Them
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Hard Times in Small-Town Tennessee: Don Rackley, lost his job after 28 years with the Carrier Corporation, which left McMinnville, Tenn., for Mexico. His wife, Jovella, charges $8 for haircuts. Former factory workers line up for unemployment benefits. The now-empty Carrier plant used to employ 1,300 people.
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
Published: October 30, 2006
McMINNVILLE, Tenn. — You may have seen Don Rackley before. You see people like him every election cycle. The human prop, he calls himself. He says it with a ring of bitterness.
He is the sort of man you see on television sitting at the counter of a diner in a down-and-out steel town, or a struggling textile town, some American place teetering on despair. The candidates come for the morning, roll up their sleeves, promise changes. The cameras snap the pictures. Then everybody leaves.
In February 2004, John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina and a White House hopeful, was that candidate in this part of the country, a place of chicken pens and cotton fields in the triangle of Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga. The region was once humming with factory jobs paying $15 an hour to start, with benefits and vacation.
But the Carrier Corporation, an industrial air-conditioning manufacturer and the financial anchor of Warren County, had just announced it was shutting its profitable plant and shipping many of the 1,300 jobs to Mexico, the latest in a string of closings in the area.
Mr. Edwards came on a cold February morning. Checkered tablecloths were put out at Prater’s BBQ out on Manchester Highway. Workers were rounded up. Mr. Rackley, the president of the Sheet Metal Workers Local 483 and a crew leader in the Carrier plant, was there. James Mears, the recording secretary, wore his union jacket and cap. They had a heart-to-heart with Mr. Edwards over bad coffee.
“Mr. Edwards promised he’d try to get Nafta repealed,” Mr. Rackley said afterward as reporters took notes.
Then, the senator left. The reporters left. And, last year, the factory left.
Left behind were thousands of people who once had a piece of the American middle class, including Mr. Rackley. The million-square-foot factory squats empty in a green pasture, like an elephant in the death field. The only reminder of Don Rackley’s 28 years there are the salt and pepper shakers collecting dust on the cafeteria table where he used to eat lunch.
“I got to give Edwards some credit,” Mr. Rackley said from the porch of his prefabricated home deep in the country across from a corn field. “At least he showed up.”
Mr. Edwards had tapped into a simmering resentment, he said. The Two Americas: the haves and the have-nots. But Mr. Edwards did not articulate a third type of America, Mr. Rackley said. The one he finds himself part of: “The used-to-haves.”
The factory employs six people now, security men making sure the place doesn’t burn down. When it was boarded up, Mr. Rackley, 48, looked for another job, but there were few beyond the convenience-store counter or the gas station. With the screw plant and box factory gone and the electric motor company in the final stages of shutdown, Mr. Rackley tried tree-stump grinding for a while, but business was catch as catch can.
Now he drives a sod truck for a third of what he used to make. His wife, Jovella, 51, has a little beauty parlor next to their house, past the white church beyond the railroad tracks, with goats and chickens roaming behind it. She charges $8 a haircut.
“Some guys are living off their unemployment,” Mr. Rackley said, his cheeks flush, his fists clenched, looking as if he might punch the man who asked the stupid question. “Worst, some guys are living off their wives.”
Mr. Rackley began working at the Carrier plant out of high school and thought he would retire there. He worked his way from the assembly line to brazing metals to crew chief.
After a while, the Rackleys were able to afford property. They raised a family and bought a new truck now and then. But that life ended in November of last year, when he punched the clock for the final time.
There are thousands of people in the area filling out unemployment applications. The Rackleys’ daughter is not working either. Nor is her husband. Eleven percent of the county is unemployed. It is the highest unemployment rate in Tennessee. The severance checks run out sometime next month.
Mondays at the unemployment office are like an Irish wake: middle-aged people telling worn-out stories, laughing through their circumstance. The place has an Orwellian name: Tennessee Career Center. James Hash, standing in line with a ball cap pulled over his eyes, put it like this: “Here you are standing in an employment line at my age. Nobody wants you no more.”
“You’re left out. You’re not American no more.”
They come to the unemployment office to get yellow cards, and it works like this: They go someplace and ask for a job; they are rejected, and receive a yellow card proving they have been rejected. This is how they earn their $275-a-week unemployment check, before taxes. They call it the barn dance, and one of their first employment-rejection stops is the struggling dry cleaning shop next door.
But Mr. Rackley refuses to take the handout. “I was raised to work,” he said, “so I swallowed my pride, and now I drive a sod truck.” He makes too much money to receive state-financed health care, makes too little to afford his own.
“The American way has slipped away,” he said, having just finished a 12-hour day that paid him $100.
“I don’t know what those people are going to do when those unemployment checks run out,” he said. “People’s going to go crazy.”
He stalks off to kill a chicken for dinner. His wife is near tears. She’ll probably never see Disney World now. She said quitting her Virginia Slims cigarettes would save some money, but there was too much stress for that.
She sweeps the parlor floor in silence for a while. She probably won’t vote in the midterm Congressional election.
“I’d like to see the politicians come back now,” Mrs. Rackley said. “We’re hurting bad down here. It’s like they used us, then forgot about us.”
posted on October 30, 2006 04:56:35 PM new
classic....he has one.
My bet is that she's been in HIDING for months now. I can't imagine her wanting to hang around a person that SCREAMS all the time. She's human after all.
posted on October 30, 2006 05:20:35 PM new
Liar_K,
YOU FOOLS JUST HAVE NOT LEARNED YOUR NEO-CON LIAR WAYS HAVE BECOME TRANSPARENT TO THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS. NOW YOU LOSE!!!!
[ edited by bigpeepa on Oct 30, 2006 07:29 PM ]
posted on October 30, 2006 09:03:10 PM new
They won't comment on the article peepa because they can't. They've nothing to say. So they pick on you instead.
A sad article for sure, but it's the kind of thing that always happens in company towns when the company pulls out. Where did the term Rust Belt come from? Like the old song says, Rust Never Sleeps, and the belt is getting bigger all the time. The administration crows about the economy, while so many Americans have been without jobs so long that they're no longer counted as unemployed.
America deserves better. Lets hope we get it soon.
____________________________________________
Grow your own Dope. Plant a Republican.
posted on October 31, 2006 05:45:06 AM new
profe51
Your right about American workers not being counted any longer. Many like the guy in the article went from a good paying job to one that pays 7 or 8 (without health insurance) bucks an hour.
Again your right neo-cons enjoy this American labor downsizing that is way BUSHY let millions of workers through our wide open southern border. The illegals work cheap and neo-cons make more money its all about neo-con greed not what is good for this great country.
Neo-cons only think of themselves they have no interest in their fellow Americans. The only way to hurt them is to get after the God they worship most the ALL MIGHTY DOLLAR.
[ edited by bigpeepa on Oct 31, 2006 05:56 AM ]
