ST. LOUIS - Laid off from an auto factory assembly line two weeks before Christmas, Gary Asnell is still jobless and doesn't care to hear about the virtues of retraining as he struggles to keep a roof over his family's head.
"They say it's a great opportunity to go back to school. But I've got to juggle to find a job to pay the bills, make the house payments and feed the children," said Asnell, a 44-year-old father of three.
In the face of rabid global competition and outsourcing of work to cheap-labor countries like China, nearly three million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.
Those at the sharp end of this process now often face serious pay cuts or retraining to qualify for jobs in industries that have vacancies which may still not pay as much as they were making before.
In the heart of the U.S. Midwest, St. Louis, Missouri was an archetypal factory town. Twenty five years ago, 40 percent of all of its high-paying jobs were in manufacturing, according to a March study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
But in the last 10 years, it has lost 63,000 manufacturing jobs. Today, the industry provides just 3 percent of all job vacancies, a recent Job Openings Survey from the University of Missouri found, while health care, social assistance and the hospitality industry deliver 60 percent.
Getting a well-paid position in any of these areas could easily demand a trip back to the classroom. Even for the young, the process is tough.
Jessica Fitter was lucky. Just 22 years old, she worked at the same plant as Asnell. She is now taking a two-year accounting course and expresses optimism about her future.
Yet even once she graduates, Fitter said the pay will only just match what she made before, at least until she gains more experience. Meanwhile, the loss of income has been hard.
"Our budget took a big hit. We have to move, we can't afford our place anymore," she said. Her partner was laid off with her and is now making much less building houses.
They were among 237 workers cut at Lear Corp. in St. Louis when the company, which makes seats for Ford and Lincoln SUVs, halved the assembly line shifts last Dec. 17 as Ford slashed demand from a nearby plant. As it happens, Ford Motor Co. is in the process of shedding another 900 St. Louis workers.
Everyone who lost their job at Lear was offered the chance to retrain. But this option does not appeal to everyone.
"The curriculum, you need to do it, you just don't have it anymore," said Asnell. "I had the prerequisites 15-20 years ago, but I don't now."
With his schooling a distant memory and bills to pay right now, Asnell knows his well-paid union job has vanished and the work that remains will pay barely half as much.
"We were up to $19 an hour (at Lear), but most of the jobs now pay $7-$8 an hour. Ten bucks is considered the upper limit and if you make $12 you're on top of the world," he said.
Of the 8,000 entry-level jobs identified in the University of Missouri study, 45 percent paid less than $8 an hour and the next 25 percent paid less than $15 an hour.
Even if he wanted to take a lower-paid job, Asnell finds that prospective employers don't want to take the chance of hiring. He said they usually look at how much he earned before, inform him that he wouldn't be happy making less and close the interview.
NATIONAL CRISIS
Officials from President Bush on down somberly acknowledge the process of globalization is sometimes painful and demands a national effort to improve education and skill development.
But among people dealing directly with the fallout of this upheaval in the U.S. industrial base, the truth for older workers is that their standards of living may never recover.
At the state level, dedicated teams are working hard to ease the transition back to work and can claim some success.
"It really is walking someone through a grieving process," said Donald Holt, executive director in the St. Charles County, Missouri career center, where many of the state's job losses from the and auto industry have fallen.
His staff offer all manner of support for displaced workers and will also pay for retraining up to a point.
Yet even with jobs available in the St. Louis area, high demands for math and English literacy means that workers who left school several decades ago often have problems.
"It's an issue and we have to deal with it. You run into it with your older clients... who went in (to the factory) aged 18 and stayed for years. It is very hard for them to go into just about any occupation now without computer skills," Holt said.
Any new job in modern manufacturing demands some level of math and computing skills that many older workers just do not possess. Not that there are many manufacturing jobs out there.
Well-paid opportunities exist, particularly in health care, but they demand a solid grasp of math, physics and biology.
"In Kansas City, we had a pilot who went into radiology -- we paid for the retraining -- and he's started at $24 an hour. That's compared with $20 an hour as a pilot," said Don Rahm, a work force development specialist with the Missouri Department of Economic Development.
Still for those who see little prospect of making such a transition, there is a powerful sense of abandonment and anger at a culture that has chewed them up and spat them out.
"How much money do you have to make to make you happy?" demanded Asnell. "Sure, I understand how our economy works, but how many people do you have to crush for your company to be happy with what it is making?"
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