http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/occupying_the_rust_belt/
Occupation with an expiration date
Youngstown, Ohio, is an elegiac city a few hundred miles to the west of Allentown. What was once the manufacturing district is a mausoleum of industry. A brick smokestack stands sentinel over acres of cavernous shells that once poured out streams of goods. Crumbling brick buildings sprout trees two stories up, while inside pancakes of concrete drip toward the ground, suspended precariously by a bramble of rusted rebar.
Demolition is one of the few signs of economic life. Starting in 2006, the city tripled its budget for razing abandoned buildings. In an open-air yard in the industrial quarter, heavy machines whine and billow exhaust as they pound large concrete slabs, surrounded by small mountains of rubble sorted according to size.
With more than 43 percent of the land vacant, Youngstown is slowly being erased. In some neighborhoods boarded-up houses and empty lots island the remaining inhabited homes, which shrink behind spreading foliage lest they be next.
Since 1950, the population has declined from a high of 218,000 to less than 67,000 today. The poverty rate is a stratospheric 32 percent, and the median value of owner-occupied homes is a paltry $52,900. Manufacturing dropped from 50 percent of the workforce in 1950 to 16 percent in 2007. This includes a staggering loss of 31 percent of manufacturing jobs in the region from 2000 to 2007 – and that wasbefore the economy fell off the cliff.
At the downtown crossroads, Occupy Youngstown has taken up position in the shadow of three different banks, including a Chase branch. The occupation is a latecomer, having started on Oct. 15, with a rally more than 400 strong at its peak, according to Chuck Kettering Jr., an aspiring actor who has been unemployed for a year from his previous position as an HVAC technician.
“We were once a huge steel city for America,” says the cherubic, 27-year-old Kettering. “In the 1970s they started closing up all our steel mills, taking all the jobs and shipping them down south and overseas where labor is cheaper. Youngstown’s been a city that has been going through this economic struggle for almost 40 years now, and I think we have a valid voice of addressing these issues on a national scale.”
His family is living proof of the toll of deindustrialization. In a phone interview, Chuck Kettering Sr. calls himself “the poster boy for the Rust Belt.” A Youngstown native, he went to work in 1973 at age 19 and worked at two local U.S. Steel plants that shuttered, one in 1979, the other in 1982. Next, he landed a position with Packard Electronics in 1985 making electrical components for GM cars. After GM spun off Delphi in 1999, Packard was subsumed by the auto-parts maker. The company started moving jobs overseas.
“Local operations were pressured by wages, and most operations moved south of the border” because of NAFTA, he says. Following Delphi’s bankruptcy in 2008, Kettering and some co-workers were given a one-time chance to work for GM itself and keep their wages, benefits and pensions.
“It was a no-brainer,” he says, but their seniority did not transfer to plant assignments. Despite nearly 25 years at Packard and Delphi, Kettering says, “I found myself at the age of 54 starting at the bottom, working alongside 21-year-olds trying to keep up on the line. Many of us who transferred were not spring chickens and it was hard to keep up.”
His wife, hired by Packard in 1979, worked her way into management, was forced to retire after 30 years with a monthly pension that was slashed in half to $1,600 and with expectations of further cuts. Now he’s on disability.
“I’m really proud of our local guys,” he says. “The police and the firefighters really support the occupy movement. Our mayor supports it. We have a united front here in Ohio.”
Unlike the seven other occupations I have visited, Occupy Youngstown embraces electoral issues. Kettering and other occupiers wave signs and wear buttons opposing Issue 2, which would strip some 350,000 public sector workers of collective bargaining rights.
Karen Joseph, a soft-spoken 59-year-old mother of two whose family spends one-third of its household income on health insurance, is by no means the only one who is against Issue 3, which would exempt Ohio from the incoming national healthcare law.
Everyone is against privatizing the Ohio Turnpike, which is being pushed by Republican Gov. John Kasich. All the occupiers we talk to express dismay at the prospect of hydrofracking in Mill Creek Park, which Kettering describes as “the jewel of the area with waterfalls, streams and lots of wildlife.”
This occupation comes with an expiration date. The city asked the occupiers to “take down the tents before business hours on Monday, Oct. 17, when the banks were opening,” according to Chuck Kettering Jr. He says they complied, but Occupy Youngstown still maintains a 24-hour presence and has pledged to do so until Nov. 8, Election Day.
