Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301260416
SECTION: NEW RIVER VALLEY ECONOMY PAGE: 38 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
JOBS ARE HARD TO COME BY
How scarce are jobs in the New River Valley?Ask Harry Fowle.
The 35-year-old was so desperate for work that he went to a temporary employment agency and for almost five months has driven 26 miles daily from his Blacksburg home for a production job at Warner Lambert's Tetra division in Pulaski County factory.
His pay: less than half of the nearly $11 an hour he was earning when he was laid off from the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in April 1991.
"It's almost not worth the long drive every day, but it's all I can find right now," he said. "Hopefully, this will lead to a full-time job."
His story is typical of many of the hundreds of arsenal employees who have seen their jobs disappear. Unable to find jobs offering a wage equal to the arsenal, the workers are forced either to return to school, move from the area or take a low-paying job.
And even the low-paying jobs aren't easy to find.
But Fowle is different from many production workers in that he has a college degree. It wasn't easy, but in 1982 he graduated from Virginia Tech with a sociology degree.
Fowle didn't have high expectations after graduation, but he figured the degree would allow him to land a job and live comfortably. He definitely didn't expect to find himself standing in the unemployment line 10 years later.
After graduation, Fowle bounced around from one sales job to another before deciding he wasn't cut out to be a salesman.
He was selling cancer insurance in 1987 - "Talk about a depressing job," he said - when the arsenal offered him a job on the production line.
Shortly after losing his job, Fowle took advantage of federal money to help retrain laid-off arsenal workers and enrolled in a computer information curriculum at New River Community College.
But in August, Fowle's unemployment benefits ended and he couldn't afford to stay in school. He was back on the job hunt.
Fowle registered with a temporary agency and it hooked him up at Warner Lambert's Tetra plant in Pulaski County.
Tetra is scheduled to relocate to Blacksburg's industrial soon, cutting his driving time by almost 90 percent. Fowle is hopeful the company will hire him full time.
"Even then it won't be much more money, but at least it will have benefits and a little job security," he said. "Right now, I'm totally expendable."