By Bill Strother, For The Times-Mail
bstrother@heraldt.com
Thomson.
GE plants in Bloomington and Linton.
Harmon Motive in Martinsville. A decade before that, the Carpenter bus works in Mitchell. More recently, auto parts maker Dana, also in Mitchell.
And there's Visteon, the big Ford parts plant in Bedford that shut last year. GM Powertrain, the other large auto production operation in Bedford, still hangs on. That plant and Visteon at one time were the linchpins of the Lawrence County economy, with more than 2,000 good union jobs at the foundry and 1,350 at Visteon.
The foundry, with only a few hundred workers now on the job, is at the mercy of the international market, national policy and politics that are much larger than Lawrence County and south-central Indiana. The fate of the Bedford plant, along with all of GM, is still not clear.
There are others. Otis Elevator's huge plant on Bloomington's west side is abuzz - or at least part of it - with activity. Engineers and designers are there, planning and designing elevators for skyscrapers around the world. Those designs once got turned into elevators at the plant. Now, they are built in other cities, other countries. That's what happened at Thomson's big Bloomington plant. At one time the world's largest assembler of color TVs, the plant closed in 1998 when production moved to Mexico.
Harmon Motive, one of Martinsville's largest manufacturing employers, closed up shop last year, moving much of its production overseas.
GE, which once employed more than 3,000 on its factory floor in Bloomington, was scheduled for complete shutdown this year. That was pushed back to 2010. Now, the 800 or so workers who remain have a tenuous reprieve.
The factory, which produces refrigerators, will be making an energy-saving model that the federal government wants to encourage, so the government is giving GE incentives to keep producing them. Closure has been pushed back indefinitely. No one says now when or if the pull of cheaper labor will finally force a move offshore.
Shrinking industries
Manufacturing in Indiana, once a core strength for the Hoosier state, has shriveled. And it hasn't happened just in northern Indiana, where you'd find the nation's recreational vehicle production capital - now on its deathbed - and the heavily industrialized region spilling over from Chicago into Hoosier counties. Neither is it simply a recitation of trademark names such as GM, GE, Ford or Otis that reveal the loss.
The numbers, too, show losses have occurred in south-central Indiana. Some of the numbers are dramatic.
An analysis of manufacturing in the Hoosier Times' 10-county region over an almost 16-year span shows manufacturing jobs declined by 24 percent from a peak of more than 33,000 jobs in 1995 to about 25,000 in the third quarter of 2008, the latest period for which data is available.
The study by the Indiana Business Research Center at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business spans the time period 1993-2007 plus the first three quarters of 2008.
After accounting for inflation, total manufacturing wages dropped by 16 percent from the peak earnings year of 1995 through to 2007, the last full year of comparable data.
The data show wide swings from county to county, with the number of manufacturing employees in Owen County, a relatively small manufacturing center, almost doubling over the course of the survey to almost 2,000 jobs in the third quarter of 2008.
But such growth is more than matched in the other direction by Lawrence County, hit especially hard by the departure of many highly paid auto industry jobs. That county shed more jobs in manufacturing than all of Owen's 2008 total manufacturing sector population, dropping more than 2,700 jobs from its peak year of 1995 to the third quarter of 2008. Over that time period, Lawrence County lost about half its manufacturing workforce.
Monroe County, the region's largest county and its biggest employer, also lost significant jobs from its peak employment year of 1997, just before Thomson closed its television assembly plant. Then, the county's factory workers numbered almost 10,000. By late 2008, there were about 2,500 fewer manufacturing workers in Monroe County.
Auto woes
Automotive manufacturing, much of it concentrated in Lawrence County, took a significant hit in employment from its peak year in 2005, when 4,250 people worked in that sector regionwide. Late in 2008, after the closure of Visteon in Bedford, the auto sector had shrunk by almost 1,000 to 3,290 workers, or almost a quarter of the high wage and often unionized auto-sector labor force.
That decline has devastated Lawrence County. Former Visteon plant manager Scott Barnes points out the plant's annual payroll was $50 million, a huge chunk of economic vitality to slice away in a county with Lawrence County's relatively small population of about 46,000 (Monroe County's is close to 130,000).
And that amount in wages doesn't count "all the stuff we bought," Barnes said. "We bought at least $15 million to $20 million from local suppliers."
Dale Duncan, another former Visteon manager, served on a committee at the plant that distributed $35,000 annually to local nonprofit programs.
Monroe County, with a more diversified industrial base and with a major university as a key economic driver, has not been as dependent on a single industry as many of the most strapped counties in the state, including RV capital Elkhart in the north, or Lawrence County, with its two large auto plants, one now closed and the other limping along with a skeleton crew.
Barnes, who ran the Bedford Visteon plant for only three years before it closed, said his bosses told him when he was assigned to Bedford that "if we performed well, then the plant would have a future."
The plant and its workers came through on their end of the bargain, he said. The company didn't. "We weren't a strategic (part of the) business," he said of the plant, which manufactured fuel system parts for Ford vehicles, among other components.
When the plant closed, the work first went to Delco, which along with Visteon was a spinoff from Ford, then finally overseas.
"That's typical of the whole business now. ... They're moving their manufacturing offshore. That's a sad state. The guys who ran our plant, and manned our plant, they really cared. They did a great job. They made money (for the company)."
Trend is clear
Management consultant Thao Nelson, who's done work for the U.S. Department of Labor on employment realignment issues, said the shift away from traditional manufacturing operations is clear. She agrees there has been a huge move from traditional manufacturing, not only in south-central Indiana but all across the United States.
That trend is unlikely to reverse, and this area, with Monroe County at its center, must be poised with its life sciences initiatives and university research connections to exploit the future for growth in those newer sectors of development and manufacturing, Nelson believes. That, and an effort to link with the national green initiative, can put the region into position for new growth, she said, especially in conjunction with serious work to attract funding through the federal economic stimulus package.
Growth in biomedicine and life sciences, with Cook and its subsidiaries and relative newcomer Baxter, are providing a countervailing force to shrinkage in heavy manufacturing. As those more traditional industrial jobs have dried up, medical device and drug manufacture have grown. Growth measures for jobs in that sector are not exact because the Department of Labor classifies them under several categories, but categories that include them - chemical manufacturing and a miscellaneous class - both show substantial growth in this region, jumping from about 350 jobs to more than 1,700 over 16 years in chemical manufacturing and almost doubling from about 2,000 in 1993 to about 4,000 in late 2008 in the miscellaneous category.
Indiana University, with its links to the biological sciences and computer technology, also has been a strong driver, with many small technology and digital companies blossoming in Bloomington. IU President Michael McRobbie is pushing a research/business agenda hard. This summer, the university's business incubator will open its doors on the east side of campus, with a mission to develop commercial applications from IU lab to production to help grow the state's economy and the local job market.
The building's first tenant already has been announced - a computer software company whose CEO is an Indian graduate of IU and whose company in India employs 4,000.
The other main driver of the regional industrial economy is defense-related and focused at the Crane Naval Weapons Center in southern Greene and Martin counties. The base and its contractors draw many highly educated and well-paid technicians, engineers and scientists to the area.
Loss and gain
For Bloomington Economic Development Corp. President Ron Walker, the move away from traditional manufacturing is readily apparent. The country's manufacturing sector has been in decline for decades and has affected Indiana and the south-central part of the state just as it has other areas of the country. The difference here is that Indiana's industrial investment has always been greater than that of most other states. "The part of the economy that was manufacturing was much higher than the rest of the country," he said. "We had more at risk. ... We stand to possibly lose more."
An added difficulty is that heavy manufacturing has always been near the top of the wages heap, he said, and loss of such dollars is substantial.
A flip side of the decline, though, is that medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical producers such as Baxter and Cook tell him that "their labor pool is the best it's been in a while," and that the workers who have come to them from Visteon are disciplined and solid - excellent job candidates. "They understand quality manufacturing processes."
Dedicated workers
Of course they do, any of Visteon's former managers might say.
"On the very last day we were there," operations manager Michael Johnston remembers, "We had a group of 15 people volunteer to stay over two hours just to make sure we had finished the last job."
"Quality stayed excellent. We ended on our longest streak (600 days) with no accidents."
Johnston himself is trying to find a place in this transitional work environment. An engineer with a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue who was in charge of a huge and complex manufacturing operation at Visteon, remains unemployed but optimistic.
"I'm feeling it's going to work out fairly well, fairly soon," he said. "I don't know why, really."
But although he expects he'll be OK in the end, he predicts the career landscape for his son - now at Ivy Tech Community College - and others about to enter the job market will be very different than it was when people went to work for a company expecting to spend their careers there.
"You just need to be prepared to be more flexible," he said, and plan on several five- to 10 year-careers in your working life. "You almost have to be continuing to go to school, even while you work. You have to have your eyes open a little bit more than our generation. ... Yeah, I think it will be more difficult."