Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 30, 1992 TAG: 9203300164
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: VERONA LENGTH: Long
So angry she's going to do something she hasn't done in years.
Vote.
"I'm tired of sitting back," she says. "I've been a passive, non-registered American."
Not anymore.
The other week, she took a nose-count of the five women who work with her on the alloy machine in the hand-packing department at the American Safety Razor plant just north of Staunton. Four of them weren't registered to vote, either. Beard immediately set to work organizing her own little caravan down to the registrar's office.
That was just the start. When Democratic congressional candidate John Edwards came hand-shaking through the factory recently, Beard snagged him with a question about the Mexican Free Trade Agreement.
"Our jobs are leaving," she pleaded. "Everytime I take a vacation, a machine is missing when I come back. Over Christmas, four machines were gone. That's 12 people."
Before long, the would-be congressman and the would-be voter were deep in a detailed conversation about the fast track and free trade and Mexican environmental regulations that would do any labor lobbyist on Capitol Hill proud.
"A lot of people don't do anything till it affects them," Beard explained later. "This is starting to affect me. They've laid off 30 people since the start of the year. They say it's because business is slow. I say it's because the machines have been moved to Mexico."
There's something happening here, and it's not just that American Safety Razor is shipping molding machines from Augusta County to Mexico.
When Roanoke Democrats met last month to nominate a candidate for mayor, the party mass meeting was overwhelmed by an unprecedented turnout of blue-collar voters - many of them union members - and their families.
In that case, the flash point may have been the flap over developer Henry Faison's using some out-of-town labor on the Dominion Tower. But the tower was as much metaphor as metal. David Bowers skillfully tapped into the resentments of working-class voters that have welled up over the years - and are only now starting to burst into the open.
Mexican workers coming to Roanoke - even if it's only eight of them, as Faison insists - symbolized the loss of American manufacturing jobs to foreign competitors in a powerful, almost visceral, way for many Roanokers.
More importantly, the punch that organized labor packed at the Democrats' mayoral mass meeting may not have been an isolated event.
There are signs that unions may also muscle their way in unprecedented numbers into the Democrats' upcoming mass meetings to select a congressional nominee.
The Shenandoah Valley isn't much of a labor-union hotbed. But here in Verona, a jumble of rail sidings and industrial parks just off the interstate, IUE Local 173 organizers have primed workers to turn out.
"They're coming out this time like they've never come out before," says Jeff Weeks, the union's educational director. "Usually you say something and it's `uh' . . . But the economy and the overall situation workers are in, you say something to 'em, and they're ready."
Which brings us back to Karen Beard.
It's not the recession that scares her so much - she's lived through recessions before - it's the more permanent structural changes in the American economy.
Molding machine by molding machine, she's watching the erosion of American's manufacturing base - as high-wage industrial jobs disappear overseas, or disappear altogether.
"They're trying to create a service economy," she complains.
If you're an M.B.A. or a C.P.A., that might mean good money. But to her, that's another way of saying minimum wage.
And it's not just union workers who are worried. In Lynchburg last week, another Democratic contender, John Fishwick, met with laid-off salaried workers from the Babcock & Wilcox nuclear fuel plant. With the Cold War over, defense contracts expiring and not being renewed, these workers now fear they'll never find another job making as much money as they did before.
This fear of the future will color the presidential campaign this fall - and our own congressional campaign.
In fact, it already has.
Forget, for now, the specifics of where the candidates stand on the Mexican Free Trade Agreement or the Trade Enhancement Act. All three Democrats are trying, each in their own way, to connect with those voters who feel the economic earth shifting beneath their feet.
Edwards, Fishwick and Steve Musselwhite spend much of their time talking about the loss of the American Dream, how each generation once expected to live better than the next, as a way of showing how much they empathize with workers' concerns.
This talk of economic despair and America's manufacturing base in decline is treacherous ground for Republicans, seeing as how it's their president who's in charge. One of the workers Fishwick met with, a thirtysomething yuppie, described himself as a Republican, but said he'd likely vote Democratic this fall.
But Bob Goodlatte, the GOP congressional candidate, sounds eager to engage any of the Democrats on the economic issue.
He doesn't believe in erecting the kinds of trade barriers that Beard - and other union members - would like to see thrown up at the Rio Grande. "You protect some industries, but as sure as not you hurt some other industry, be it agriculture or something where we export," Goodlatte says.
Goodlatte sounds more sanguine than the Democrats about the inevitability of many traditional manufacturing jobs disappearing.
He says the key is to make it easier for entrepreneurs to develop new technologies and to educate Americans better, both in and out of school - so that displaced workers can move into that new generation of high-wage, high-tech jobs.
So what would he say to Karen Beard?
"I would tell her have no fear. We'll compete. This economy is on the move again and we'll give businesses incentives to expand. There'll be jobs for every American who wants to work and I'm confident American workers can compete."
But Karen Beard harbors plenty of fear.
"I've been here four years in August," she says. "And I'd like to keep on working here."
For most of us, elections are about politicians' jobs.
For Karen Beard, this election is about her job.
She and her newly registered co-workers on the alloy machine will vote accordingly. For the first time.
Dwayne Yancey is covering the 6th District congressional race.
by CNB