Losing 500 Jobs is a Tragedy, Not a Number

Superior Closing Shows No Place is Safe, Even NWA

NWA Media/JASON IVESTER The Rogers Superior Industries plant is shown last week on North Dixieland Road. Company officials announced last Wednesday they will close the plant by the end of the year.
NWA Media/JASON IVESTER The Rogers Superior Industries plant is shown last week on North Dixieland Road. Company officials announced last Wednesday they will close the plant by the end of the year.

I have no words of wisdom or comfort for the 500 people who will lose their jobs when Superior Industries International Inc. closes its plant in Rogers later this year. Moments like Wednesday's announcement show how little the political one-upmanship I normally write about actually matters.

This is Northwest Arkansas, a supposedly safe spot in our national economy. We reeled from the recession, but must of the rest of the country was blighted. We are the place that wasn't a bubble. We didn't collapse like Las Vegas or much of California or Florida. Yet even we aren't safe from a plant closing and taking 500 jobs with it. It can happen, even here. This is a something we should never forget.

The boom years of the 1990s, with their fake paper profits and accounting tricks, masked a long, severe decline in this country's manufacturing base. The workers of Superior in Rogers did very well to buck the trend this long. And the trend's still going.

Kathy Deck of the University of Arkansas cut to the bone in her comments. "Those are good-paying jobs, and it's a big number," she said. She's dead-on right. Not all jobs are created equal. Not all have benefits. Not all are steady. Not all have regular hours that give you time with your family. You won't see any of that when you look at the unemployment rate.

I know what she's talking about better than most, unfortunately. I once had the unpleasant distinction of having covered more plant closings than any news reporter in Arkansas. I started on the state news desk of the old Arkansas Democrat. I arrived just in time to cover the collapse of the state's aluminum industry.

To this day there's nothing -- nothing -- I'd rather not cover more than a plant closing. My first big one was in a town called Magnet Cove. The loss of the jobs was bad enough. What really got to me, though, was realizing jobs that paid so well were never coming back. At least not for that many people in that particular place. I bawled like a baby in my car all the way home. Yet that was just the start. Before the aluminum industry dismantling was over, I was covering plant closings in my home town.

I also happened to stay in the same area long enough to see the aftershocks. Some college-educated professionals had believed that manufacturing had nothing to do with them. I watched many of them lose their jobs years later. The local economy could no longer support them in the style in which they had become accustomed.

When I left state desk, I went to the business desk. I never lost my long-practiced ability to walk up to people who'd just lost the best-paying job they would ever have and get them to talk to me. I found myself in demand. My real job was farm reporter, but when Brown Shoe Co. in Pocahontas closed a plant that had been open since 1944, guess who went. And when Phillips Lighting closed its factory in Little Rock, an easy drive from the largest newsroom in the state of Arkansas, guess who went. Those are just the ones that stuck with me so hard, I couldn't shake the memory. I can't even remember many more. I try not to.

I felt like the guy in a book I read, a pilot who had to bail out over enemy territory. He got back to his own lines, but had to sneak up on a lot of lonely sentries and kill them along the way. His officers noted his knack. They gave him no more planes to fly. They kept sending him behind enemy lines to kill people and find his own way out. He hated it, but orders are orders. He also realized he was the best one to go.

So yes, I hate covering plant closings. Yet here I am, writing about one that I didn't even have to cover. I'm doing it because each closing, each job lost, is a tragedy. Each time it happens, someone who understands just how tragic it is should write about it.

The guy in that book I read went crazy. Maybe that explains some of the stuff I write.

DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.

NW News on 08/03/2014

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