Impacts of the Maytag Closure in Newton

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The economy of central Iowa — and, in particular, the area immediately around us in Grinnell — took a huge blow yesterday, when Whirlpool executives announced that they planned to close the Maytag plant in Newton in 2007. The city of Newton was practically built around Maytag, which was founded in Newton over 100 years ago, and which currently employs 1,200 Newton residents. So that’s 1,200 jobs that won’t be in Newton anymore in a year and a half.

Drew has already posted about the impact this might have on the Boswell-Lamberti congressional race, and the IDP followed his lead this morning in a press release that made roughly the same arguments:

“The merger was anti-competitive, as Rep. Boswell warned, and has now resulted in a devastating loss of jobs in Newton,” said Mike Milligan, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party. “Jeff Lamberti’s poor decision to back the merger ignored other potential buyers of Maytag who wanted to keep the operations working in Newton. And now, worst of all, he is trying to avoid accountability.”

In fact, the IDP’s entire main page is dominated by various incumbents’ comments on the Maytag announcement. They know what I don’t think anyone has wanted to say out loud yet: incumbents get blamed for stuff like this, even when they shouldn’t be. Everyone reading this probably already knows that it’s not Vilsack’s fault and it’s not Boswell’s fault, but — unless the IDP and the politicians themselves get the word out really, really well — it’s going to hurt incumbents in the polls. So we really need to work on this now. Especially if union support goes down in the area, it could hurt Boswell a lot.

But I’m very interested to see what kind of an impact this is going to have on the surrounding area, including Grinnell and Marshalltown. Something tells me that jobs are going to get a lot harder to find here, too, as more people start competing for the same number of jobs.

What are some things we can do to solve the problem? Well, in this poorly written Register article (hopefully it’ll get cleaned up by an editor soon), I found this particularly interesting:

Robert Henderson, a Maytag union representative, said health care costs and the rising cost of health insurance likely contributed to the plant closing. He also said top managers and other white collar workers will continue to have insurance while others will lose out.

That sounds like something the Democrats in Des Moines are trying to fix, so hopefully they’ll be able to take care of that soon. And since most of this post has been a downer, I’ll close with another quote from the Register piece — this time a kind-of funny one:

Maytag workers learned the news shortly after 8 a.m. today. After the news was delivered, officials closed the plant for the day, said Maytag workers, who had gathered at Snook Inn Sandwich Shop. Workers were expected to report back to work on Thursday.

“I’m still digesting it,” said Carroll Simbro, as he ate cheesy potatoes and fried eggs.

Related Posts

• Is Newton the next Flint?
• Last Day of Work for Maytag Employees in Newton
• Fighting for Newton
• News Roundup (5/11/06)
• Hillary Clinton in Newton

Entry Filed under: Miscellaneous, Gubernatorial, US Congress, Democratic Party, State Politics

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