Looking for work - Missouri's landscape littered with layoffs

For nearly four decades, the fabric of Tom Massey's life largely was turning reams of denim into jeans at a southwest Missouri plant.

But Massey and many of his 750 co-workers in Lebanon, including his wife, sensed trouble, well aware that VF Corp. -- the world's largest apparel maker -- was shuttering its other Missouri plants one by one. Folks at Jeanswear Lebcut, Massey said, braced for the inevitability of pink slips.

The bad news came Oct. 17, when the plant's manager announced over the loudspeakers the factory would be history, now scheduled to shutter by late next month.

Facing the prospect of searching for work for the first time in 37 years, 56-year-old Massey glumly admits: "I'm not sure I know how anymore."

Massey's misfortune isn't atypical in Missouri, where announced layoffs affecting thousands of workers littered the landscape in 2002 from Neosho to Mexico, Mo., and beyond. Pink slips -- or word of them -- came from some of the state's dozen Fortune 500 companies to makers of everything from bricks to barbecue grills and, yes, blue jeans.

'I'll just move on, I guess'

"I'm sure I can find another job, though it won't pay as much," he said as his $29,500-a-year job nears an end. "I'll just move on, I guess. I hate to see it close, but the sun's gonna come up the next day. And everything will be all right."

While state economists in April forecast Missouri's economy would turn the corner by summer's end, the comeback never came.

"Clearly, we in Missouri are still being affected by the national recession," state Economic Development director Joe Driskill said this month in announcing that Missouri's work force shrunk by 2.83 percent from March 2001, when a national recession began, through October.

Nationwide, that decline trails only Georgia and Delaware.

Until Missouri bumps its way to prolonged growth, Driskill warned, "people will be out of jobs, many businesses will struggle to get by, and communities and state government will continue to see stagnant -- if not declining -- budget revenues."

Among the expected job cuts are a "significant" number by St. Louis-based Charter Communications Inc., whose rocky 2002 included its stock price getting pummeled amid Wall Street concerns about its debt load and an ongoing federal probe of its accounting.

Amid the pink slips, other businesses found 2002 to be quite rosy.

While continuing its double-digit earnings growth, Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest brewer, installed Patrick Stokes as its president and CEO, marking the first time in 142 years that a Busch or Anheuser family member has not been in day-to-day control of the St. Louis institution.

Still, layoff announcements came early and often in 2002. Among them:

American Airlines announced in August that up to 1,550 St. Louis-based workers -- mostly with the former Trans World Airlines -- would lose their jobs as part of American's massive restructuring. Nationwide, the carrier expects to shed 7,000 positions.

In July, Vanguard Airlines Inc. shut down and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after the Kansas City-based discount carrier's years of losses, sending more than 1,000 workers packing.

Kansas City-based energy company Aquila Inc. -- formerly UtiliCorp United -- began the year with about 7,300 workers but laid off about 1,800 of them.

In Mexico, Mo., the Audrain County place once known as the "Firebrick Capital of the World" -- word in November was that its last brick factory will close in mid-January, costing 200 more jobs. National Refractories and Minerals Corp. also will shutter its 34-worker firebrick plant in Wellsville. Such job cuts follow the April closure of A.P. Green's 200-worker brickmaking site in Mexico.

Farmland Industries Inc., based in Kansas City as the nation's largest agricultural cooperative, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May after a flagging fertilizer market the past several years contributed mightily to its financial morass.

Sunbeam last month revealed it will close its outdoor grill factory in Neosho next year, jettisoning hundreds of jobs from that southwest Missouri area's economy. The plant, which at one point had as many as 1,200 workers, at peak production now has about 450.

General Mills Inc. announced it will close a Hazelwood plant by next fall, affecting more than 400 jobs in a St. Louis suburb already reeling from Ford Motor Co.'s plans to shutter a 2,600-worker assembly plant there by 2005.

Rawlings Sporting Goods Co., which next year plans to close a 230-worker Licking plant where custom uniforms are made, this month agreed to be acquired by Los Angeles-based outdoor equipment maker K2 Inc.

In Caruthersville in Pemiscot County, Trinity Barge said it could lay off most of the barge-fabrication plant's 545 workers in February if new business doesn't sail in soon. Said maintenance worker James Simpson: "This is about the only thing going in Pemiscot County. This is the last. When it closes, nobody knows what they're going to do or where they're going to go."

In northeast Missouri, Louisiana Manufacturing's 41 workers learned this month that their 49-year-old plant, which makes aluminum and electrical conduits, will close next year. Said Louisiana Mayor Jim Yokem: "It doesn't help the Louisiana economy any and certainly doesn't add to the Christmas spirit much."

Lisa Huff can sympathize. Laid-off in recent months with a few hundred others at the closure-bound Fasco motor-making plant in Ozark, the single southwest Missouri mother with a 10-year-old son makes do with about $225 a week in unemployment -- half her previous take-home pay.

"I own a house -- at least I do for now," she said, months after losing her $12.20-an-hour job at Fasco, where she worked for two decades. "I haven't hit rock bottom yet, but things are getting pretty slim, yeah."

Undeterred at 40, Huff attends a Springfield trade school, planning to become a dental assistant.

Her lament: "I'm a little too old to be going to school and trying something new."