mking@etruth.com
GOSHEN -- Dixie Robinson watched Johnson Controls Inc., where she worked for 44 years, move to Mexico.
At one point, it employed 1,250 people in Goshen, but starting in the late 1980s, the company started moving manufacturing to Juarez and Reynosa, cities near the U.S.-Mexico border. It ended operations near Goshen High School in early 2006.
Marcia Bechtold even followed her job to one of the new plants. She moved from Middlebury to El Paso in 1990 and was there until 2000. She crossed the border to work. She loved El Paso, but she and her husband moved home after he got sick.
"I was happy there, but I wasn't happy with the situation," Bechtold said.
Robinson, who won a seat on the Goshen City Council on Nov. 6, wasn't happy about what happened either. She watched longtime co-workers train people from Juarez to do the jobs they'd had at 1302 Monroe St.
"That's a really sad thing when you're showing somebody how to do your job and you know in a few weeks you'll be without a job," she said.
Outsourcing gets Robinson wound up.
"It's taking jobs away from American citizens," she said.
So does illegal immigration. Both of them are economic issues she has strong feelings about.
She wants a major corporation to go into a small town, build a factory and start making goods it could advertise as "Made in America by Americans."
"I think people in America have seen what's happened in this country and they're going to be willing to pay a little more money for something that's put Americans back to work and was made in this country," she said.
Companies move operations to Mexico or China to save.
"It's money. They're all doing the same thing," she said.
Meanwhile, her 58-year-old sister can't find work and illegal immigrants are coming to northern Indiana to work.
"We have to deal with the illegals in some way," she said. "We can't support them."
Larry Shank, president and owner of AE Techron Inc. in Elkhart, doesn't deal much with immigration, but is affected by outsourcing.
More and more of the components in the electronics equipment his company builds are made in China.
"I found a business where I can provide a good wage for a manageable number of people doing good work. But my transformers are from China. My resistors come from China," he said.
One piece of equipment needed three transformers. Initially he bought them for $250 each from a company in Osceola that had been part of Crown International. Then he found an Indianapolis man who bought them in China and resold them for $202 each. Then he found the supplier in China and pays $70 each.
Can he support the local company?
"I can't," he said, noting that the price is too high.
AE Techron is making high-end amplifiers that Japanese and Chinese customers buy from him to survive in tough environments.
"In those kinds of markets, where your engineering is more important than how many pounds of parts you've got, we're very, very competitive with the rest of the world," he said.
He tried to compete on consumer-related items, but couldn't match prices of items from China.
"After five years of that, my wife said I needed to find a different hobby because we were needing to feed our children," he said.
Elkhart is a cost-effective place to do business, but is "in the middle of the woods" in terms of the electronics industry.
"Getting someone to move from Los Angeles to Elkhart and accept an Elkhart salary is hard," he said.
He's learning about business overseas and how others view American business.
"We're really good at creative thinking in comparison to a lot of Oriental cultures," he said.