From: USA Today
RAVENSWOOD, W.Va. — When Henry Kaiser arrived 55 years ago, this place was no place — “a rural problem area,” the government called it, so poor and isolated that the population had dropped 15% since 1940.
That all changed after Kaiser, the industrialist who’d turned out ships and planes at a record pace in World War II, built the nation’s largest consolidated aluminum works here on the banks of the Ohio River.
The plant paid Tim Shumaker his first living wage, and he won the right to keep it two decades ago after his union was locked out for 19 months.
Today, that victory seems hollow. Shumaker, 49, has been laid off. Part of the vast aluminum complex is closed, and the rest is for sale — its orders down, its workforce reduced, its future uncertain. Shumaker stands at the locked plant gate and, after a year without work, worries what’s next for him and his community. “The way things are going,” he says, “there’s not going to be anything here.”
Ravenswood, with 4,000 people and one big factory, is like many towns in the USA where things still are made: caught in a winter between recession and recovery, hoping the latter will arrive before the former kills the last decent blue-collar job.
If the rest of the aluminum works closed, “would this become a ghost town?” muses Jim Frazier, principal of the Henry J. Kaiser Elementary School.
Whether it’s textiles in the Carolinas, paper in New England or steel in the Midwest, most industrial cities and mill towns “are on pins and needles,” says Donald Schunk, an economist at Coastal Carolina University. “Day to day, week to week, any manufacturing facility seems vulnerable. People don’t know if they’ll be there.”
That’s true in:
• Georgetown, S.C. (pop. 9,000), where the closing of the local steel mill last year left International Paper as the last major private employer.
• Madawaska, Maine (pop. 4,000), where workers voted last month to take an 8.5% wage cut to keep the financially strapped paper mill going.
• Glenwood, Wash. (pop. 500), where flat lumber prices and rising land prices are crippling the forest products industry.
Anxiety over possible layoffs or closings can disturb workers as much as the real thing, experts say. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says it’s uncertainty that really bothers people: They feel worse when they think something bad might happen than they do when they know it will happen.
Ravenswood knows the feeling. It’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The aluminum works south of town has two parts: a reduction plant (or smelter), where ore is heated to 1,800 degrees to make aluminum; and a fabrication plant, where aluminum is rolled or stretched into sheets or plates. Since 1999, the plants have been separately owned.
A year ago last month, Century Aluminum closed the reduction plant, laying off Shumaker and about 650 other workers. The fabrication plant, owned by Rio Tinto Alcan, still employs more than 1,000.
What if the Alcan plant, which bought its raw aluminum from Century, also were to close?
That worries almost everyone, including Frazier at Kaiser Elementary. Of the school’s 160 families, 37 have parents who worked at Century; many others have breadwinners at Alcan.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell labor relations professor who studied the 1990 Ravenswood lockout, says that if the second plant closes “that town would die.” Other communities sustained by manufacturing face a similar fate, she adds: “We had ghost towns in the past. We could have them again.”
The difference is that people could leave a ghost town — miners to work new veins, farmers to till fresh land, merchants to move closer to road or rail.
Today, Tim Shumaker sees no such options. In past layoffs, he always found work somewhere; now there seems to be none anywhere.
So, like almost everyone else here, he’s staying put, wondering whether Ravenswood could become a new kind of ghost town: a place where people stay, because they have nowhere else to go. Click to continue »
