Carrier shutdown will impact entire region
Businessman Eddie Martin says most Warren County residents don’t have any idea what’s about to happen to the local economy now that Carrier has halted production and laid off hundreds of workers.
As a man being forced to close Martin Crating, a company that was founded here in the early ’70s, Martin knows as well as anybody how Carrier has provided a quality lifestyle for Warren countians.
Martin is painful proof that Carrier employees aren’t the only ones who will be affected by the plant’s closing. Dozens of other businesses that have relied on Carrier as a primary customer will feel the pinch.
Those businesses are located throughout Middle Tennessee. And Carrier employees commuted to this county to work from the entire Midstate.
Warren County director of economic development Don Rigsby has said a 14-county area will feel the repercussions of the plant closing. Of the 1,300 employees who worked at Carrier at the time of the announced shutdown in February, 2004, about 750 of them lived in Warren County. The other 550 lived from Pulaski to Crossville and everywhere in between. A rare few even lived out of state.
Replacing Carrier will not be easy — perhaps impossible. The days of high-paying manufacturing jobs locating in the United States have virtually vanished. At the risk of spreading a doom and gloom forecast, the chance of landing a company that employs 1,300 people in this community may never happen again. The competition is just too fierce.
Some local Carrier employees who have gone to Mexico to train their replacement workers have come back with stories of the huge wage discrepancy. Employees at the Carrier plant here could easily earn $16 to $17 an hour. There were also profit sharing bonuses and full health care benefits.
In Mexico, those same Carrier employees are set to earn $13 to $14 a day.
There is simply no way the United States can compete. Even minimum wage workers in America earn far more than Carrier employees in Mexico.
The difference in pay is even wider when the jobs are being moved to China. According to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who was recently in town, the going rate for Chinese labor is about 83 cents an hour.
All this illustrates just how difficult it will be to replace Carrier, not only in this community but in this entire region.
The loss was just beginning to sink in for some Carrier employees last week. They have known their fate for over a year, but it didn’t really sink in until the final unit rolled off the assembly line Thursday.
Some of those co-workers will never see each other again. Many will never have such a high-paying job again. And others will take this as an opportunity to retire and never work again.
It’s a time of drastic change for Warren County and the entire Upper Cumberland region. Carrier’s departure only continues a trend of manufacturing jobs that are on their way out of this county and out of this country.
The challenge for Warren County residents, and workers all across America, is to find a new niche and new job skills in this ever-changing workforce.