Wakeup call or siren's song for Galesburg?
By Mike Kroll
As we sit
here today the prognosis for Galesburg is bleak. We have already lost thousands
of middle-class jobs, the city's population is both in decline and in the midst
of a demographic remix while people are literally fleeing the rural areas
surrounding Galesburg and we are squandering precious time and scant resources
as we fail to recognize what is happening. This is not a new problem. It has
been decades in the making – it began well before the closing of Maytag
and Butler. If things continue as they are Galesburg will be a meager shadow of
what it is today in just a few years as we face an accelerating crisis while
our current community leaders fiddle obliviously as this community whithers and dies.
No one likes
to hear bad news and that is especially true here where we prefer to be mislead
by promises that never come true and dismiss critics as naysayers without the
necessary positive outlook. For many of us there seems to be an unquenchable
resolute belief that things will magically turn around if we refuse to
acknowledge all evidence to the contrary and simply wait for someone to
announce good news.
This
attitude coupled with local leaders who cannot seem to lead, possess extremely
myopic vision and are counting on outsiders to rescue us akin to the
just-in-time arrival of the cavalry in movie westerns is contributing to the
decline of our town. As a community we need to take stock of our real
situation, realistically assess our strengths and weaknesses, and develop a
plan to revitalize the Galesburg area by recognizing the changing economic
realities that have made the life we know obsolete.
The
downfall of Galesburg, and hundreds of other rural communities similar to us,
is due to changing economics and our inability or unwillingness to reinvent
ourselves to accommodate changes we cannot stop and continuing to ignore them
is suicidal.
At its
heart Galesburg has always been a blue-collar working class community rooted in
a dependence upon agriculture and low-skilled manufacturing and assembly
employment for our continued existence. For the initial 100 years or so of our
existence Galesburg mirrored much of this country in its demographic and
economic stratification. A small number of key residents controlled the wealth,
resources and politics while the vast majority of working-class families
struggled mightily but managed to eke out an existence.
In those
days farming was very different than it is today. Small family farms
predominated where raising livestock was integrated with crops of corn,
soybeans and vegetables into a very labor intensive and risky endeavor. Most
family farms were never more than a bad season away from ruin and hundreds or
thousands of such farms were dependent upon small cities like Galesburg to sell
their crops and livestock and trade for goods and services.
The smaller
merchants and business owners composed a small middle-class while larger
merchants, bankers, factory owners and managers, and professionals made up the
town's upper and ruling class. In sociological terms this was a highly
stratified population not unlike that found across Europe. Then as now
America's poor were far better off than the poor in third-world countries but
they were just as exploited and the desire to improve one's status made the
industrial revolution possible. Until the end of World War II it was possible
to pull oneself out of poverty and into the working-class by having the will
and energy to toil for long hours and very limited pay at mind-numbing factory
tasks across this country.
That all
began changing following World War II but most of us failed to recognize that
fact and most of us in Galesburg still haven't begun to understand how our
economy has changed over the last 50+ years. The close of the war drastically
changed economic and social stratification in America but, more importantly, in Europe and Japan as well.
In the rebuilding years following that war there was a significant expansion in
the middle-class, thanks in large part to the GI Bill but even more so to an
American economy that redefined itself and its workforce during the war. It was
during World War II that the traditional roles of women and minorities in this
country changed forever and after the war millions of returning GIs discovered an
economy unprepared to reabsorb them. The true reason for the GI Bill wasn't
just to thank our veterans for their valiant service but to slow their push
back into the American workforce by diverting tens of thousands of them to
college and vocational schools.
The GI Bill
introduced the idea that education could be a realistic goal of all Americans,
not just the wealthy and privileged. Before that war only a small portion of
Americans went to college and high school graduation rates were far worse than
those we lament today. It was not only possible to find a reasonable job
without a high school diploma it was the norm. The working class were only
marginally better off than their cousins the poor but they at least were on a
path that promised a better life for their kids.
Following
the war factory jobs flourished across this country but especially here in the
Midwest. Sure big cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit claimed most of
these jobs but hundreds of smaller cities and towns across the midsection of
this country also saw the arrival or expansion of local manufacturing and
assembly operations. Galesburg was a good, if unlikely, example.
This town
began on a base of agriculture due to the fertile soil beneath our feet and
because of geography would probably have never been much more without the
arrival of the railroads. Most industrial towns sit upon major rivers that
provide much needed transport, water and sewer capacity that Galesburg lacked.
But the presence of railroads helped change that and made it possible for
Galesburg to host a wide assortment of manufacturing and assembly plants that
had modest water needs. These plants employed thousands of workers most of whom
were poorly educated and low-skilled but hard-working and industrious.
By most accounts
Galesburg's most prosperous and successful times were the years immediately
following World War II through the mid-1960s. The city's population grew and
greater numbers of our citizens transitioned into the middle-class as factory
salaries rose. More and more Galesburg families sent their children off to
college and high school graduation was finally seen as an important if not
necessary goal for most children. The assumption was that the factories would
continue to provide a comfortable living for the less educated but industrious
who could still live comfortably in Galesburg and raise their own family.
For too
many of us here in Galesburg life's goals, ambition and vision was frozen in
the world of the early 1960's even as world, national and regional economics
began changing in the late 1960's. That change only accelerated during the
1970's and 1980's until by the turn of the 1990's the comfortable economic
world that most in Galesburg knew no longer existed. But for some inexplicable
reason no one here in Galesburg seemed to see this change happening or they did
see it and refused to recognize its implications for this community. Meanwhile
those Galesburg children whose parents so proudly sent off to college left
never to return because they could see what the rest of us refused to see that
there was no future for them in Galesburg.
An economy
based on low-skilled manufacturing and assembly jobs had a foundation of sand
that collapsed as it became possible to ship those jobs off to third-world or
developing countries teeming with available and industrious low-skilled labor
willing to work for pennies on the American dollar because in their case that
still represented a economic step up from the poverty they had always known.
The economic advantage follows the resources and in labor-intensive
manufacturing it was just a matter of time before those jobs left Galesburg
never to return.
We can
blame the management of OMC or Maytag or Butler as all of those plants were
still profitable when they closed in Galesburg but the fact is they could be
much, much more profitable with the extremely lower labor costs and absence of
regulations that characterize the developing world. Things aren't great in
these new overseas plants. The lack of regulations and oversight has lead to
many more worker injuries as well as highly publicized quality and product
safety difficulties but economics remain viable.
Circumstances
have changed but our local expectations have not. Low-skilled manufacturing and
assembly jobs are gone for good from Galesburg never to return. We need to
cease wasting our time and resources attempting to lure such jobs back or
trying to replace them with smaller numbers of equally dead-end warehousing
jobs in our so-called Logistics Park. Even if our economic development
officials were wildly successful beyond their own optimistic promises and bring
in 200-300 total jobs paying an average of ten dollars per hour this doesn't
begin to replace the jobs lost. And realistically they will be fortunate to
create 100 real jobs in this boon-dongle project. It is nothing more than a
political gimmick or gesture designed to placate irritated residents by showing
that local officials are doing something however ineffective. The simple fact
is few of our local political and economic development officials have any clue
how to save Galesburg but are so entrenched in the ways of the past that they
cannot begin to entertain new approaches.
Galesburg
is akin to a ship at sea in the midst of a huge storm losing power and essentially
rudderless.
We are all
familiar with the current political talk about a federal gas tax holiday being
proposed by presidential candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton and opposed
by Barack Obama for being
the counterproductive political gesture it is. Well Galesburg's China
Initiative is in much the same league. We send our mayor and GREDA officials
off on costly junkets to China putatively to solicit Chinese investment here in
Galesburg. Our leaders believe that because of the presence of the BNSF that
Chinese firms will see wisdom in locating warehousing and assembly operations
here in Galesburg thereby creating local low-skill jobs. Why would we think
this?
China's two
economic advantages are an ample supply of malleable, low-cost, low-skilled labor
and virtually no regulations makes it so very profitable to manufacture or
assemble goods there that American firms are relocating but we expect the
Chinese to invest in Galesburg? This is either crazy or economically ignorant
or both. We are continuing to squander time and resources on a lost cause
because we lack the vision and willingness to pursue a different course.
We the
people of Galesburg can no longer wait for someone to ride in to rescue us from
ourselves. If this community to to continue to survive
we must reclaim responsibility for our own future. We must candidly recognize
the changing economy and honestly assess our community strengths and
weaknesses. And most importantly we must abandon the failed strategies of our
past.
America
will not be able to continue exporting manufacturing jobs overseas but neither
can we reclaim them with old-style operations. The future of American
manufacturing is in high-technology manufacturing plants that employ small
numbers of highly skilled employees to produce high-quality goods at prices
that are competitive with lower quality foreign-made products. We must reclaim
our role as the producer of top quality products at realistic prices or of new
products that cannot be made elsewhere.
Unfortunately,
our overseas competitors have recognized this changing economic reality sooner
than we and are already moving toward creation of exactly such high technology
plants alongside those low-tech plants they lured away from us. China and India
are devoting much more attention to the importance of education and retaining
these highly trained youth that we here in America. As the American
middle-class has been decreasing so too has college enrollments as the cost of
an American higher education has skyrocketed.
The brain drain
that has traditionally characterized Galesburg and towns like us all over this
country has become a crisis of our continued existence. Our future is tied to a
better educated workforce and that means not only more high school graduates
but many more of our children that leave Galesburg for college must be lured
back. We need to rebuild our local economy around a diversified and educated
workforce that provides both service sector and manufacturing jobs.