Archive for January 27th, 2008

So it seems good ol’ Emporia is having a bit of an employment crisis (link to the main story, here). The small town of roughly 26,000 is having one of their largest employers downsize from 2,400 to 900 (Tyson Foods, a major beef processing plant). They’re moving their slaughter operations to areas closer to the cattle raising farms and feed lots (ooh, what an idea, move the processing closer to where the animals and food is, duh). But with that closure and the layoffs, people are running around fretting like there’s no tomorrow.

It must have been relatively nice to be in an area that hadn’t been touched by the crash of 2000/2001. To see anyone lose their jobs is tragic, but it’s not the end of the world. Beef workers of their own accord didn’t make that much per hour, and it’s far worse to have a half million dollar mortgage and have no job than to have one that pays 25/hour or less on a mortgage of maybe 50,000. For one thing, getting another job or two to make up the per hour, is a hell of a lot easier to come by, and unemployment will cover most of it. How many people realize that there’s a cap on the amount you get paid out for unemployment (although I notice that there’s no upper limit to how much you have taken out of each paycheck).

Reading over the outraged comments, it’s interesting to note how many of the truly long winded rants are all coming from people who don’t even work there. Most of the well thought out and calm posts are from the very people who are being laid off. Not all follow that pattern, but quite a few. The meeting with the town council seems to have been all bluster from the speakers, and glad handing from the officials. No one brought up the idea of examining the tax incentives that the company enjoys, seeing if they could be motivated to keep some more of the workforce in place. The workers never unionized, so there’s no particular redress from there on the point of senior employees having no ability to bump more junior hires (given the local patience with the influx of Somali workers, I’m sure that keeping a green new hire on while laying off a 10+ year veteran will do little to improve the mood of the community with their new townsfolk.)

The company is at least giving severance and some options to transfer elsewhere. They weren’t obliged to do anything other than to pay out the accrued vacation time. Consider how many companies simply go bankrupt and wind up with nothing – no warning, no last check, no PTO, just nothing. And every employee from the moment of the bankrupt filing, are simply additional creditors who have to wait in line to be able to get their slice of whatever happens to be left when the pie gets sliced up some time down the line.

In the follow on story of the city officials putting a Bush-worthy positive spin on things (available here) is rather sad. City Manager Matt Zimmerman was quoted as saying that they were taken completely by surprise. One of the primary functions in a town that size is to keep a pulse on the major businesses and employers in the town. That there’d been no inkling that this was coming down the pipe shows a basic ineptitude for the position he’s been entrusted with. It’s either his own lack of ability, or that of his staff, either way it falls to him to have kept an eye on things.

Let’s take his next award winning quote:

“Like we’ve heard from many employers, there’s not enough of a trained workforce — well, there is now,” Zimmerman said. “So, hopefully, there’ll be much less of an impact than we’re all obviously concerned about… We’re also recognizing that this is an opportunity to diversify.”

Why do I think that while some people may be able to transfer their skillset in the community directly over to a new position (such as at the dog food plant), there’s not a lot of processing plants in Emporia. Just because a person is skilled/trained in one job, doesn’t mean that they can readily drop into something entirely new. A mechanic is a member of a trained workforce, it doesn’t mean that they can jump into being a press operator the next day.

A comparison between this employer pullout and the tornado destruction in Greensburg is additionally silly. In the Greensburg case, you had the employers wanting to rebuild and continue forward. The community had the sense of pulling together and rebounding together as a community. Here it’s a general sense of the collective carpet having been pulled out from under the employees and being let down by the city officials as well as by Tyson. It’s incredibly demoralizing, and the civic leaders need to try to bring a sense of focus and next steps (job retraining, anyone? loan assistance for new business owners? local tax credits for existing employers who create new job positions. These are the kinds of answers that are needed by former workers and their families trying to decide their next steps, not platitudes and vague references about “how it’ll all be ok.”

To Manager Zimmerman, lay out a plan on how those people will find new jobs, retraining, and what the city and the community is willing to do to help. It’s a hard blow, but not unrecoverable; those affected (and the wider community at large) need a sense that there’s a plan forward, something that they can look to as a sign that they’re not going to be forgotten.

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