Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/business/yourmoney/26maytag.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: August 26, 2007

NEWTON, Iowa

THE last of the Maytag factories that lifted so many people into the middle class here will close on Oct. 26. Guy Winchell and his wife, Lisa, will lose their jobs that day. Their combined income of $43 an hour will disappear and, soon after, so will their health insurance. Most of the pensions they would have received will also be gone.

The Winchells are still in their 40s. They can retrain or start a business, choices promoted by city leaders in a campaign to “reinvent” Newton without its biggest employer. But as they ponder their futures, the Winchells are uncertain about how to deal with a lower standard of living. “I’m not wanting to go waitress,” said Mrs. Winchell, who, at 41, drives a forklift and earns $19 an hour, “but I can do what I have to to make money.”


Lisa and Guy Winchell will lose their jobs at the Maytag plant in Newton, Iowa, when it shuts down on Oct. 26. Above, they worked on his bus, converted into a recreational vehicle.

Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn’t looked. “Lisa is always on me because I’m so angry,” he said. “She says, ‘What would your mom have said?’ My mom would have said, ‘Worrying is not going to help.’”

Newton’s last day as a manufacturing mecca comes a century after Fred L. Maytag built his first mechanical washing machine here. Over time he also located his headquarters, research center and most production in Newton, changing it from a rural county seat into a prosperous city of 16,000. Absent Maytag’s high pay, overall hourly earnings last year for other workers in the county would have been $3 an hour less, according to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency.


Matthew Holst for The New York Times

Tootie Samson was laid off from Maytag but later recalled to help wind down the plant. She will go back to school with federal aid.

And then the Whirlpool Corporation bought Maytag in the spring of 2006 and began shutting down its operations here, eliminating jobs and depressing wages. Those caught in this process around the country are gradually swelling what Katherine S. Newman, a Princeton sociologist, describes as “The Missing Class,” the title of a soon-to-be-published book (Beacon Press), of which she is co-author.

FULL 3 page story at link.

[dugggy]

1. Manufacturing industries are the main vehicles in wealth creation

and it is sad to see US losing so many manufacturing outfits.
The only other avenues for wealth creation are mining and
agriculture, both of which are still holding their own here.

So who will all the lawyers and doctors and accountants work
for or get clients when manufacturing is gone abroad? I wonder!

[Double T]

2. M and A combined with relocation and outsourcing to foreign nations.........

IS and WILL continue to dismantle and destroy our country until NOTHING is left but a third world nation. The corporate and wall street traitors and their enabling investors are the GREATEST ECONOMIC TERRORIST THREAT to the U. S.. Something will be done as the American people will NOT stand by and allow this to happen. Revolution by the masses in inevitable.

[stillcool]

3. I hope I'm around to see...

how it all shakes out. I like to think that by necessity the family unit, and Main St. will return...maybe even some humanity.

[Double T]

4. When individuals without a conscience and with no remorse........

are running our government, wall street and corporate america, the return of humanity is a LONG WAY OFF. I believe this country will be turned around; we just need to get rid of the sociopath/psychopath leadership that is rotting the core of our nation.