Racine, Haunted City Look What Happens When Indussry Flees
Bybee, Roger
Racine, Haunted City Look What Happens When Industry Flees By Roger Bybee Illustration by Doug Fraser In 1917, my mother's parents packed up their meager belongings in St. Louis and loaded them...
...My paternal grandfather, who got fired three times for his activism, saw his home foreclosed on...
...Crime is one of the only growth industries...
...Food Bank Executive Director Dan Taivalkoski said in May that the organization's pantry wasn't emptied last winter only because "the community really came through with food and monetary donations...
...Even as he paid himself the highest CEO salary in the country, Posner wrenched pay and benefit cuts worth nearly $4 an hour from workers at Racine Steel...
...Louis and loaded them and their little children into a railroad freight car headed to the then-bustling industrial mecca of Racine, Wisconsin...
...When I visit the North Side neighborhood where my parents grew up, I see massive factories reduced to rubble, vacant lots strewn with garbage along State Street, and the occasional chain store filling a gap here and there...
...The fact that even $25,000 would not adequately sustain a family in Racine was obviously not a factor that merited consideration...
...Despite luring affluent boat owners from the Chicago and Milwaukee suburbs, the big publicly subsidized harbor project failed to produce the trickle-down effects predicted by its promoters...
...Last November, labor lobbyist Cory Mason was elected to the State Assembly and pro-labor progressive John Lehman took a State Senate seat away from the Republicans, even though Lehman was out-spent $393,000 to $200,000 by his opponent, William McReynolds...
...We could not compete with companies where workers are paid $2,500 a year and our workers were paid $25,000 a year," one of the new owners said...
...Said Thomas of the AFL-CIO: "I've never seen this intensity of political activity for our candidates...
...In 2004, the Racine County Board-normally dominated by conservatives-voted 20-0 to call for the state to boycott World Bank bonds...
...In at least three other cases, community opposition blocked corporations from moving out of Racine during the early 1980s...
...But the need is not going down...
...Eventually, Racine Steel was sold to new owners...
...As it happens, my paternal grandfather was also a socialist factory worker in Racine...
...The Depression hammered Racine, and my family...
...But in this case, the checkbooks of the CEOs were no match for the shoe-leather of labor going door-to-door discussing critical pocketbook issues...
...These days, no one is moving to Racine to seek factory work...
...Racine's unemployment rate consistently remains the state's highest, and many former industrial workers have been permanently demoted to low-wage, low-benefit jobs in the service sector from which they have little chance of rising...
...And it became one of three Wisconsin cities-along with Milwaukee and Sheboygan-that elected socialist mayors...
...He has also served as communications director for several progressive organizations in Wisconsin...
...Racine County AFLCIO Recording Secretary Ron Thomas captured the emotion behind the county board resolution...
...In 1982, when Massey-Ferguson ignored the pledge of job security it had given in exchange for wage cuts, a broad coalition of unions, community groups such as the NAACP, clergy, and progressives brought out some 800 people for a militant march...
...I'll never be able to walk into the shop again and ask workers to vote Democratic after this," one UAW local president said at the time...
...For example, after Chrysler wiped out 5,500 jobs in 1988, $7 million in public funds was spent on retraining the workers over three years...
...Embarrassed by the flood of community outrage and negative media coverage, the corporation announced two days later it was abandoning its plan to move...
...It is surrounded by a suburban ring of anonymous strip malls and relatively well-off white suburbs (the city itself is 20 percent African American and 14 percent Latino) and a harbor filled with luxury boats (owned primarily by wealthy outsiders) on the Lake Michigan side...
...During the upheavals of the 1930s, Racine was a hotbed of working class radicalism...
...There is a beast out there called the global economy," he said, "and it has devoured thousands of jobs here, and hundreds of thousands of jobs across the nation since NAFTA...
...The 125-year-old Rainfair clothing plant, scene of historic strikes in both the 1930s and 1990, has been torn down and the jobs shipped off to China after the firm was taken over by LaCrosse Footwear...
...Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and anti-globalization activist...
...Despite the loss of union jobs, labor still retains significant political strength...
...But during the 1980s, Local 553 members were put through the wringer by corporate raider Victor Posner, who was eventually nailed for securities fraud and tax evasion...
...Some Dominican nuns led the effort, assisted by labor...
...Inner-city Racine bears a haunted look, with its vacant factories and dilapidated houses...
...On North Memorial Drive sit the remains of the Racine Steel Castings foundry, which used to provide the first opportunity for succeeding generations of Eastern and Southern European immigrants to earn union wages...
...But after Bill Clinton pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, labor was at a loss...
...A lot has changed since then...
...The downtown has a Potemkin-village feel to it, with a front of neatly restored brick buildings hiding the squalor of the surrounding areas...
...Two members of my extended family even "scabbed" as replacement workers during a 2004-2005 labor dispute at CNH (formerly Case), though their father has been a longtime union activist...
...He edited Racine Labor, the labor movement's official weekly paper, from 1979 to 1993...
...Racine is not the same city my grandparents came to or I grew up in...
...But part of the fighting spirit remains...
...The latest idea, hailed in The New York Times, is that former factory workers will somehow find prosperity as Racine tries to convert itself into an artists' colony, replete with a new $11 million Racine Art Museum and about a dozen galleries on Sixth Street...
...Plant closings triggered a deep sense of betrayal...
...Now that's something my grandfathers would have cheered...
...By 1980, UAW Local 553- by then, mostly black and Latino- still had 1,100 members who had been lifted to middle class status by the union...
...Once they arrived, my staunchly socialist maternal grandfather found the industrial work he sought so desperately...
...It is a victim of corporate globalization...
...Poverty in Racine now stands at 20.7 percent, and hunger gnaws at residents...
...The county jail's capacity is being expanded, at a cost of $29.1 million, to 860-about a sixfold increase since 1980...
...But twelve galleries and a museum will not fill the crater left by the loss of 13,500 factory jobs...
...With the corrosion of the city's industrial base, Racine officials dreamed up one economic salvation scheme after another...
...My mom had to drop out of high school to support her siblings...
...In Rainfair's place sits a gargantuan, windowless, cream-colored "Youthful Offenders Facility...
...From a peak of 31,900 manufacturing jobs in 1979, Racine has lost 13,500 factory jobs, 42 percent of its industrial base...
...The Food Bank, which supplies food to local pantries and meal programs, has seen more than a 30 percent increase in the amount of food it's giving out compared to a year ago...
...Yet after the retraining, 60 percent earned less than $28,000 (in 2006 dollars) and fully 20 percent remained jobless, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Parkside...
...As Racine's factories have been emptied out, jails and prisons have been filling up...
...The Racine County Food Bank is in danger of running out of food this winter because of heavy demand from food pantries in recent months," the local paper reported in November...
Vol. 71 • July 2007 • No. 7
