Looking for a way out without leaving home (Gary, In.)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-070216garyunemployment-html,1,2847232.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

THE BROKEN HEARTLAND
Looking for a way out without leaving home
Manufacturing jobs once held promise for minorities in Gary, but dwindling opportunities are holding young workers back and creating social conflict in a city many have fled.

By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter
Published February 18, 2007

Washing dishes. Stacking boxes at a supermarket. Dead-end, penny-ante jobs. One year out of high school, Rashad Ward wants out of this kind of work and doesn't want to get pulled down by friends stuck in these jobs.

"I just keep it in my mind that I'm going to make it," he said during a break from a construction apprentice training class. But he dropped out a few days before it was over to start a restaurant job. It's back to the rut.

In blue-collar communities like Gary, where most of the good-paying factory jobs have vanished, both young workers like Ward and older workers with limited skills are left stranded. Some scrape by with only a glimmer of hope that their lives will improve.

It wasn't always so. Once thousands of African-American workers poured into Midwestern factory towns like Gary, Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. They sought to escape Southern poverty and racism, and grab good-paying jobs in mills and plants that would give them a boost up the economic ladder.

As recently as 1979, more than 40 percent of the black men at work in the Midwest earned their living in factories. Nationally, that figure was 25 percent, according to data compiled by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington-based liberal think tank. But by 2006, those numbers had fallen to less than 20 percent for the Midwest and 10 percent nationally.

As plants shuttered and manufacturing jobs were outsourced, the great migration to factory cities began to reverse. Many of those who benefited from factory work, which enabled them to purchase houses and cars and put their children through college, have since moved away. That trend is especially noticeable in Gary, which has shriveled from a population of 175,000 in 1970 to less than 100,000 today.

"The folks left behind are the people who couldn't leave or who had a fear of leaving," said Alex Wheeler, who chose to stay. The son of a steelworker who came north from Mississippi, Wheeler at 19 started working in Gary's mills, and later worked his way up the ranks of the United Steelworkers union.

He left the mills and union several years ago to become an official with Calumet Township. He is also president of Gary's school board.

FULL story and video at link.

[Kolesar]

1. Black History Month is black

in the manufacturing economy. I saw the premonition of it in Youngstown. The steel industry collapsed in the Mahoning Valley in 1980 and the employment rate in Youngstown went to more than 50%.