Drip, Drip, Drip

There hasn't been much in the news lately about the slowly dissipating job force here in Pretzel City. Another 50 jobs or so are scheduled to be "outsourced" from Honeywell by March. I don't know, but I feel that a great deal of the problem with business these days is that it has dehumanized the people who work for the major companies. Perhaps it has carried over into the smaller companies, especially those that want to be like the big companies, but the choice of language used in business takes away from the human aspect.

No one is "fired" anymore. Instead, a person is "downsized," "right-sized," "outsourced," "doesn't fit in anymore," or is lost through "attrition." Of course, much of this occurs on short notice when someone is called into a meeting and given just enough time to "clean out your desk." How much courtesy is given or trust to people who in many cases have given many years of their life to a company. Loyalty is fast becoming a virtue of the past. It is still irksome when some CEO makes millions in salary and bonus for what? Letting people go so that the shareholders will be happy with another two cents per share profit?

It is not only the people that are "let go" that are affected, but it is the entire community. It is the morale of a community. It is the school districts and the health care system. It is the impetus to establish more jobs or to develop greater real estate opportunities. It is the non-profit organizations that suffer along with the smaller mom-and-pop businesses that rely on the steady salary of the local citizens to keep their doors open. It is the lending institutions and the tax base that erodes. It is the drip, drip, drip of a community hemorrhaging good employees, citizens and people until the area is anemic. And when there is insufficient prospects for new jobs, it is as if there is no source for transfusion to reinvigorate the community. We put on band-aids to stop the visible bleeding, but it is the deep, internal bleeding that goes unnoticed for months, years, decades before someone realizes that there is an unkown source of the blood loss or job loss, if you will. We can speculate about the source, but until it is discovered we treat the symptoms, but not the cause.

Former publisher of The Journal Standard, Mr. Gary Quinn, informed this community that we would not be able to rely on the Big 3 of Honeywell, Newell, and Goodyear for many more years. He said that the area was too heavily dependent on its manufacturing base and that it would slowly erode over the next 10-15 years. His prognostication was right on the money. And yet, here we are with nothing to replace the jobs that are leaving, except the occasional retail store and the promise of a hog processing plant. We are not alone in our current state of affairs. Many small towns in the Rust Belt are looking for ways to draw in new employers, whose jobs allow people to maintain a decent standard of living. How many are out there, though, that are not sending the lion's share to Mexico or Third World countries that work for low wages and produce products that are not always up to the standard that is acceptable by U.S. standards? But then again, have our standards been lowered to the point that we will continue to put up with these changes as long as we have access to cheaper products?

We may not be on life support, yet, but the patient is nearing critical condition.