"NOYB" wrote in message
link.net...

"plantsman" wrote in message
om...
Bull! to Newsmax. I don't care how they cook the books on this one,
jobs
are not being created in Tennessee and more are going way south or far
east
every day. In just my area of NE TN, in the past ten years, we've lost
something to the tune of better than 6,000 manufacturing jobs and over
1,000
more engineering and support jobs for the area's industry. That's
almost
a
quarter of all industrial jobs here. Even Burger King has taken down
their
"Help Wanted" signs. I'm a Republican but if the Bush team succeeds in
measuring burger flippin' as a manufacturing job, them I'm going to
reconsider my vote come November. Real estate here is a mini-mansion
buyers
market, as so many white collar folks have had to pull up and relocate
when
their $100K+ jobs evaporated due to cutbacks.

They're not selling to relocate to a new job. They're selling to relocate
to a nicer climate. Our real estate market in Southwest Florida is still
going gangbusters. I just sold my house today after about 60 days on the
market. We sold it for 37% more than we paid in January 2001. Finally, I
can pull the boat out of the marina (it's a friggin' hour and half drive
to
go 30 miles), and park it in the back yard of my new home.





It's still not over, more
layoffs are expected as the area's largest employer, Eastman Chemical,
sells
off one of their divisions and potentially 2,000+ people will be
impacted.
We've got Bechtel mechanical and chemical engineers delivering pizzas
and
working for the newspaper in an effort to keep from having to move away
and
loose their butts on their homes. It is the pits! My former employer
(industrial equipment/supply) (I retired in July due to illness) went
from
having over thirty people working to only about eleven, due to the
fallout
from Eastman basically stopping in their tracks. They're not optimistic
about surviving as a company. Several competitors and related companies
have already bellied-up. Everyone from car dealers, furniture stores,
and
everyone except Wal-Mart has been impacted.

I couldn't imagine a worse hardship than working for the only major
employer in a certain area, and then that employer picking up and moving.
Unfortunately, your area isn't experiencing anything different from what
those living in the mining towns of PA experienced decades ago. People
complained about the same thing back then.


It's a fact of life that every year, technology changes, mines dry up, or
jobs get sent overseas. It sucks that manufacturing jobs are being sent
overseas, but that's the reality in a World economy with the WTO and
NAFTA.
Any candidate that will tell you he/she can do something to slow the
exodus
of jobs going overseas is full of ****. Completely full of ****! Ask 'em
for details. Kerry says "he'll close the loopholes". What loopholes!?!?
Demand they be specific! The bottom line is...Perot and Buchanan were
right. However, the loss of manufacturing jobs was inevitable. NAFTA and
the WTO just expedited things.

===================
The situation at Eastman Chemical Co. may be sort of unique among large
companies. This huge plant, one of the largest chemical plant sites in the
world, was originally a division of Eastman Kodak. Twenty years ago, they
employed almost 18,000 people. Then Kodak got the bright idea to spin them
off, as they were wanting to stay more in the photographic business and less
into chemicals. The spun the company off into Eastman Chemical Co.
Beginning about ten years ago, they started contracting out almost
everything that had been in-house except the chemical operations.
Engineering, construction, railway services, all the way down to guards and
cafeteria workers. Tons of people were laid off and then rehired at much
lower wages by the contractors. They did this gradually to have a riot on
their hands.

This company used to be very paternal, no one had been laid-off since the
1950's. My dad worked there for 41 years and most of my relatives also
worked there. Eastman was the whole reason that the city of Kingsport
existed in the first place. It was just country prior to about 1920 when
George Eastman came down from NY and bought a wood mill and small methanol
plant that was built for WWI but not completed in time. Methanol was once
used in the photographic industry. A few years ago, Eastman's president
was given an incentive that was hard for him to resist. Bring Eastman's
stock value up to a certain point, and he could retire from the board with
better than a one million dollar bonus on top of the $400K+ he was already
making. This was when the real bloodletting began. To reduce costs, they
would reduce staff across the board and close a lot of their smaller plants
located around the world. This proved very painful to the community and it
has not recovered. Well, old Earnie wasn't totally successful with the
stock pricing scheme, but he still quietly retired very wealthy and moved
out of state. I'm sure there's a price on his head. We have other
industries (paper mill, printing, glass) but the number of people at these
jobs is miniscule compared to Eastman.

Eastman even coerced the city government to build a large Marriott
conference center and golf course so they'd have a place to entertain out of
town business people and our sales tax went up to help fund it. What
Eastman quietly did once the facility was almost finished was to build their
own "retreat" on their mountainside property about five miles away to host
their VIP's. The city currently has to subsidize this conference center in
the six-figure range annually. Funny, we never hear too much now from
Eastman about the "retreat".

You can blame Wal-Mart for a measurable amount of lost jobs across the
country. They've squeezed suppliers so tightly that they've had to go
overseas to keep afloat. Just ask the folks at Vlasic Pickles about their
experience. I'd say less than 5% of what W-M sells is now domestic in any
form. The almighty stockholder dollar, it's ruined our country.

David S.