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HOPE IN HEARTLAND
MARCH 18, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
The people of Dayton, Ohio have had to deal with a slew of corporate restructuring in the past decades. Margaret Warner profiles several residents and their methods of coping.
MARGARET WARNER: When workers went on strike at two General Motors brake plants in Dayton this month, it was just the latest economic jolt to a city that's had more than its share. This city of 200,000 is a resilient place. It has a rich history of invention and entrepreneurship. Dayton natives invented the cash register and built it into a worldwide business, National Cash Register or NCR. Daytonians Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane. Other inventions helped make Dayton a major manufacturing center for auto parts, machinery, and tools. Today, manufacturing still provides 1/3 of the jobs in Dayton. Fortune 500 companies like multinational Mead Corporation are prospering. Smaller, high-tech companies are growing.
Unemployment in the Dayton area is just 5.1 percent, better than the nation as a whole. The median family income is slightly below the national average, however, about $36,000. And it now takes most families two wage earners to achieve that. Still, this is a dramatic turnaround from the recession and double-digit unemployment of the late 1970s when some thought towns like Dayton would die, and yet, there seems to be a sense of unease.
SPOKESMAN: People don't feel the community is on its back. They don't feel the community is threatened, per se. They just feel uneasy about their particular situation and how that's going to evolve. I think below that there is kind of a fragility that people feel. They don't feel that perhaps if it's going well today, that it'll necessarily be going well tomorrow.
MARGARET WARNER: Corporate takeovers and restructurings at companies like NCR helped create that insecurity. NCR, which in its heyday employed 25,000 people here, shrank to 5,000 local workers before AT&T took it over five years ago. Since then, its work force has been cut to half that. Those jobs are being replaced, but many are in the lower-paying service sector and few of the newer manufacturing jobs at smaller firms offer the heavy wage overtime and benefit packages that blue collar workers had come to expect. One Dayton institution is profiting from all this upheaval. Sinclair Community College does a booming business in retraining.
Tens of thousands of Daytonians have had to cope with these changes in their professional and personal lives. David Gaylor, who's 45, had parlayed his master's degree into a 13-year career in human resources at NCR and AT&T, but last Fall, he was downsized out of his job. For now, he's working for NCR as a short-term independent contractor and counts on his wife's teaching salary to help them support their three teenagers.
At 57, Lucille Dursch is taking computer classes at Sinclair, after being downsized out of NCR-AT&T. First her NCR assembly line job was moved to Colorado, so she joined the company's cleaning staff. Last Summer, AT&T eliminated all its union janitorial jobs and contracted out the work. She took early retirement to preserve her health insurance.
Union membership has helped protect 45-year-old Tony Curington so far. A worker at one of the GM brake factories, he isn't taking part in the strike there because he works on non-GM contracts. This father of five enjoys a comfortable life thanks to his $19-an-hour wage and his wife's salary as an emergency room nurse.
The fact that Jeff Woodward, 48, has his own plane, helped salvage his career prospects. He left Lexis-Nexis last Spring, after Mead Corporation sold it to foreign owners. After six months out of work, he began commuting each work to work as chief financial officer of a company in Florida. His wife teaches school.
Gina Clark, 35, is a single mother who used to make good money in the cable TV business, but a series of restructurings in the communications industry left her without steady work a year and a half ago. She now does temporary work at ten to twelve dollars an hour, most recently at NCR-AT&T and at Lexis-Nexis.
At 39, Harvard Business School graduate Jim Whelan is doing well. He's executive vice president of Gem City Engineering, a growing high-tech manufacturing firm. Gem City sells automation equipment to microelectronics companies worldwide. His wife used to teach school but now stays home raising their four children. We gathered these six Dayton residents to talk about how they've come to terms with this time of economic change. We met last Friday morning at the Engineers Club, a Dayton landmark founded in 1914 by two of the city's business pioneers.
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