لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
When I arrived at the Oglethorpe, the night was just getting started and Chuck Jenkins was fussing with the sound system. He and a handful of others had dreamed up the weekly event as part of their effort to save the Oglethorpe, which has been around since the Fifties, from Albany’s crashing economy. Jenkins had donated a garageful of sound equipment that he’d amassed while working at Cooper. A hulking sixty-year-old harmonica player who looked like a cross between a middle-aged hippie and a member of ZZ Top, he was quick to admit that he was still an amateur when it came to music. “I can’t play but so long, or it’ll be repetitive,” he confessed. His bandmates were former co-workers. Tonight, they would join the show to cover everything from James Brown to AC/DC.
The Oglethorpe’s regular crowd is mostly white, but it’s one of the few social spaces in Albany that is truly integrated. “I had a guy my age out at Cooper, and when we started our band, he asked me if black people could come to the restaurant where we played,” Jenkins recalled. He laughed and shook his head. “This was 2005!” Jenkins had been in Albany since 1970. He said he’d seen a lot of changes, but few as dramatic as Cooper’s shutdown.
Jenkins was hired at Cooper in 1992, and was among the first to work at the Albany facility — his time card was number 306. He stayed there until the plant closed, in 2009. He had been out of work ever since, spending down his pension and exhausting his unemployment benefits while taking classes and sending job applications into the void. “There is a depression that comes with that,” he acknowledged quietly.
Jenkins started at Cooper as a machinist, spinning wire into rubber casings. “Then I went over to tire assembly, where we actually assembled the basic carcass of the tire,” he explained. “I did that for eight and a half years, and then I became a material handler.” He hauled giant coils around the plant to keep the various units humming. By the time of the shutdown, he’d graduated to a team that tested new production techniques. As at Bobs, no one at Cooper believed the end was coming until it arrived.
Plenty of U.S. tire factories had closed during the preceding years — many at the peak of the business cycle. This was another new and odd economic trend of the 2000s. After China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, in 2001, cheaply made Chinese tires flooded the U.S. market, and U.S. tire jobs went to China.
Cooper was one of several U.S. tire makers that opened plants in China during the 2000s; the company even sent workers from Albany to train their Chinese counterparts. Jenkins remembered that moment proudly. The Albany plant required a skilled workforce to make giant, complicated tires for trucks — the smallest production error could be disastrous. “We were told this is probably the most modern of the tire plants, the most room to grow,” Jenkins said. “We were led to believe that they would not have spent all this money here to develop this if they were going to . . . ” He trailed off.
One week before Christmas in 2008, Cooper announced that it was closing the Albany operation. The company had determined that its expanding operations in China meant that one of its U.S. plants had to go. Management conducted an internal audit to pick the loser, setting off a frenzied competition. Two of the four plants were unionized, and the labor force made huge concessions to the company, including wage freezes. Albany’s workers, who were not unionized, could offer nothing comprehensive.
Cooper’s shift to China has been enormously lucrative for the company. In 2013, annual profits were $241 million. The CEO, Roy Armes, who joined Cooper in 2007, made $9 million last year. Trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama Administration was trying to push through Congress this summer, could make it even easier for Armes to move more of Cooper’s operations to Asia.
Jenkins said that during his seventeen years at Cooper, he topped out at around $56,000 a year, plus benefits that included the pension he had just about burned through after four years of unemployment. Like so many others, he got caught between the simultaneous crises in the housing and job markets. Rather than lose the house that he had bought after starting at Cooper, he escaped foreclosure by sacrificing more than a third of his pension to pay off his mortgage. He figured that he’d at least avoid homelessness.
Recessions always create a trailing effect in which joblessness and poverty extend past the worst part of a downturn. But the most recent recession has had a tail like no other. As of May 2015, nearly 30 percent of the nation’s unemployed had been out of work for at least six months.
“Part of it is there’s this change in the social contract — employers behave differently now,” says Austin Nichols. During previous recessions, large employers tended to behave like the McCormacks: they were slow to lay off workers because the cost of hiring and training was so high. It was better to weather the downturns and capitalize on the recoveries. Productivity used to drop during recessions, as companies temporarily employed more workers than needed. But according to Nichols, “That wasn’t the case in the Great Recession; productivity actually rose. . . . What that indicates to me is, employers were letting go of more people than they had to. They were actually aggravating the problem.”
When I returned to the Oglethorpe a few months after I first met Jenkins, he wasn’t there. Friends said they hadn’t seen him in weeks, not since he’d taken a seasonal job working on the pecan harvest. At sixty, he had begun a new career as a farmhand.
This weekend, I was cutting grass and I said, ‘Lord, I just need you to keep me busy today.’ Two different people called me!” Major Jones was testifying in front of his Sunday-school class, part of a small congregation he and Vieliene founded in 2012. “All day Friday, I worked,” he said, building volume and fervor as he recalled the weekend’s rare good fortune. “Came yesterday, I said, ‘Lord, I need some more work.’ Anotherguy called me, said, ‘Man, you can do the yard on Monday.’ ” It was an outpouring of opportunity right when he needed it, and to Jones, it was divinely inspired. “You have naught but His favor!”
“Amen, you got to believe,” Vieliene said. “We’re walking in favor!”
Our Bibles were open to Genesis, Chapter 15, in which Abram is having trouble trusting in the Lord. He has grown restless waiting for God to fulfill His promise that Abram would become the father of a great nation, and he wants to know how he can be sure it will come to pass. God offers reassurance, but reveals that Abram’s people will endure 400 years of slavery and hardship. The people must hold on and bear up under their ordeals; only then will they be delivered to the promised land. This is familiar scripture for black Americans, certainly in the South. But for the Joneses, the teaching felt fresh and urgent. “God is working on my behalf!” Jones declared triumphantly at the end of his testimony.
Organized religion is just about the only industry still growing in Albany, a fact that inspires cynicism in some. Even the Joneses look warily at Albany’s proliferating houses of worship. But, Vieliene told me, “people need hope.” Their church is the House of Hope Fellowship Church, and their services are relentlessly positive. God’s favor is celebrated with equal intensity for an out-of-work member who avoided eviction and for another who got a $25 late fee waived at Sam’s Club. As Vieliene put it, “We already know the devil is busy, why lift him up?”
In 2006, Jones was hired by a temp agency with a contract on the Marine Corps base. The catch was that his job would last only two years, until the end of his employer’s contract. Since 2008, he’s surfed from contractor to contractor, managing to stay in the workforce for two years at a time. “After people on the civil side kind of like you and they know you, they’ll recommend for you to be picked back up,” he said. “Ain’t nothing guaranteed with that.”
The government doesn’t collect comprehensive data on how many public-sector jobs have been privatized in recent years, but an approximate measure of the change is the amount of money it spends annually on contractors; in 2012, that figure was $517 billion, an increase of 150 percent from 2000, according to a recent National Employment Law Project analysis of federal data.
Jones said that he earned just a little less than his civil-service co-workers on the base, but he was not compensated for sick days, and his contract could be terminated at any time. That instability became clear to him in 2013, when across-the-board federal budget cuts, the so-called sequester, forced furlough days at the base. He lost a lot of hours, time he could scarcely afford. As it was, he was making the same wages — roughly $19 an hour — that he had earned ten years earlier at Bobs. This kind of wage stagnation is widespread today, and it puts Jones and millions like him just one crisis away from insolvency.
In the absence of a federal solution to these problems, some have argued for a fundamental change in how we build local economies. Shirley Sherrod, formerly the Department of Agriculture’s director of rural development in Georgia, is perhaps most famous for having been caught in the crossfire between the Tea Party and the White House. In 2010, the Obama Administration pressured her to resign after Andrew Breitbart publicized a heavily edited video in which Sherrod appeared to confess that she had denied federal aid to a white farmer. The full video revealed that precisely the opposite had happened.
Long before Sherrod became cable-news fodder, however, she and her husband, Charles, were household names in southwest Georgia. Charles was among the first SNCC organizers to come to the region; there’s a park dedicated to him in downtown Albany. Shirley grew up in Baker County, one of Albany’s rural satellite communities, and has been one of the region’s most dedicated poverty fighters.
I visited Shirley Sherrod at a plantation that her agricultural-development organization, New Communities, bought in 2011. The facility, which is used for research and training, seemed to exist in a different universe than the plantation as imagined by Paula Deen. Using the collective action of the sharecroppers of her grandparents’ generation as a model, Sherrod was teaching new farming methods and giving civil-rights workshops. “I can point from one community to another here in this county where people actually worked, together, to acquire land and do things in their community,” she said.
The plantation is one of several loosely connected efforts that Sherrod oversees. Others include an old schoolhouse that’s been remodeled as a USDA-certified commercial kitchen and an ongoing campaign to create a central processing center for local farmers. These efforts feel like drops in an ocean of need, but Sherrod argued that town by town, such projects can make a difference. “It could be a whole lot more, but what if it wasn’t anything?”
Barack Obama was supposed to bring more options to places like Albany. As a candidate in 2008 and 2012, he campaigned against the currents that have concentrated wealth and intensified poverty in America. He said he was going to freeze foreclosures and demand that banks release job-creating capital for small businesses. He was going to invest in infrastructure to replace jobs lost to offshoring and the operational efficiencies of private equity. Some of these things have happened, but most have not. If the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty passes, the offshoring, at least, will get worse. Meanwhile, House Republicans have led a campaign to blame poverty on the few, essential programs that hold it at bay for millions of families.
Given this political climate, Sherrod’s brand of hyperlocal, worker-by-worker economic development has the advantage of at least acknowledging the crisis. There’s not much time left for the federal government to similarly come to terms with reality.
In the meantime, Albany waits for a change. I once asked Major Jones if he thought his city was already beyond salvation. He answered carefully; his faith does not allow for total despair. “Death lies in the power of your tongue,” he warned. “But sometimes, it’s gotta get worse before it gets better.”
