The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [67]
It wasn’t this rich history, though, that had taken me to Galesburg. Instead, I’d gone to meet with a group of union leaders from the Maytag plant, for the company had announced plans to lay off 1,600 employees and shift operations to Mexico. Like towns all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded by the shift of manufacturing overseas. In the previous few years, the town had lost industrial parts makers and a rubber-hose manufacturer; it was now in the process of seeing Butler Manufacturing, a steelmaker recently bought by Australians, shutter its doors. Already, Galesburg’s unemployment rate hovered near 8 percent. With the Maytag plant’s closing, the town stood to lose another 5 to 10 percent of its entire employment base.
Inside the machinists’ union hall, seven or eight men and two or three women had gathered on metal folding chairs, talking in muted voices, a few smoking cigarettes, most of them in their late forties or early fifties, all of them dressed in jeans or khakis, T-shirts or plaid work shirts. The union president, Dave Bevard, was a big, barrel-chested man in his mid-fifties, with a dark beard, tinted glasses, and a fedora that made him look like a member of the band ZZ Top. He explained that the union had tried every possible tactic to get Maytag to change its mind—talking to the press, contacting shareholders, soliciting support from local and state officials. The Maytag management had been unmoved.
“It ain’t like these guys aren’t making a profit,” Dave told me. “And if you ask ’em, they’ll tell you we’re one of the most productive plants in the company. Quality workmanship. Low error rates. We’ve taken cuts in pay, cuts in benefits, layoffs. The state and the city have given Maytag at least $10 million in tax breaks over the last eight years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never enough. Some CEO who’s already making millions of dollars decides he needs to boost the company stock price so he can cash in his options, and the easiest way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay the workers there a sixth of what we make.”
I asked them what steps state or federal agencies had taken to retrain workers, and almost in unison the room laughed derisively. “Retraining is a joke,” the union vice president, Doug Dennison, said. “What are you going to retrain for when there aren’t any jobs out there?” He talked about how an employment counselor had suggested that he try becoming a nursing aide, with wages not much higher than what Wal-Mart paid their floor clerks. One of the younger men in the group told me a particularly cruel story: He had made up his mind to retrain as a computer technician, but a week into his courses, Maytag called him back. The Maytag work was temporary, but according to the rules, if this man refused to accept Maytag’s offer, he’d no longer be eligible for retraining money. If, on the other hand, he did go back to Maytag and dropped out of the courses he was already taking, then the federal agency would consider him to have used up his one-time training opportunity and wouldn’t pay for any retraining in the future.
I told the group that I’d tell their story during the campaign and offered a few proposals that my staff had developed—amending the tax code to eliminate tax breaks for companies who shifted operations offshore; revamping and better funding federal retraining programs. As I was getting ready to go, a big, sturdy man in a baseball cap spoke up. He said his name was Tim Wheeler, and he’d been the head of the union at the nearby Butler steel plant. Workers had already received their pink slips there, and Tim was collecting unemployment insurance, trying to figure out what to do next. His big worry now was health-care