Meeting focuses on outsourcing in Southeast Missouri

Business Today

Rob McClanahan was three and a half years away from retirement when he lost his job at the Doe Run smelting plant in Farmington. His job was outsourced to China.

On Oct. 19, McClanahan was one of about 50 people at the Osage Community Centre in Cape Girardeau. He spoke as part of a presentation by Americans for Democratic Action titled "Stop Trading Away Our Future."

"Outsourcing stole my American dream," McClanahan said.

Keynote speaker Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, said that since the North American Free Trade Agreement passed in 1993, Missouri has lost 31,068 jobs due to outsourcing. Almost half of those have been lost in the last four years.

Ancel has spent the last several months researching the issue. She said she found that in the 12 counties that she termed Southeast Missouri, there have been 51 instances of outsourcing at 33 companies resulting in the loss of about 4,600 jobs in the past decade. That includes 926 jobs from Cape Girardeau County, 373 from Scott County and 334 from Bollinger County.

Cape Girardeau County lost 400 jobs from the Florsheim Group Inc. shoe factory, 290 jobs from Tri-Con auto manufacturing and, most recently, 99 jobs at Rubbermaid in Jackson. Ancel said these jobs have been shipped to foreign countries and the majority of them are never coming back.

"Before NAFTA, Missouri was a place where you could still find blue-collar jobs that provided a living wage, could support a family, provided for retirement and produced tax dollars for the community," Ancel said. "Today these jobs have become increasingly hard to find."