Moved, not gone

The closing of the Owens-Illinois glass bottle factory in Huntington in late 1993 was indeed a shock. Everyone knew it was coming, but the announcement came sooner than the community expected.

At the time of the announcement, one Herald-Dispatch reporter was on vacation. When he returned, he offered this observation, which got no traction in a newsroom intent of viewing this as a calamity of unparalleled proportions: Those jobs haven’t left the area; they’ve just moved.

That reporter, who later became the editorial page editor, knew that the plant closed because of market shifts. The only product the Owens-Illinois plant could make was glass bottles. There were various kinds of bottles, but the plant could make glass and glass only. By 1993, the move to plastic was almost complete.

About 30 miles up the road from Huntington in the Mason County, W.Va., town of Apple Grove is the plant now owned by M&G. It makes tiny plastic pellets that other companies use to make microwave food trays and, of all things, containers for beverages and other consumer products.

So if you draw a big enough circle around Huntington, you see that in the long-range scheme of things, those hundreds of jobs at Owens-Illinois didn’t leave. They just moved. Not as many people work at M&G as worked at Owens-Illinois in its heyday, but that’s the story of all manufacturing.

Or we can try to remember the old coke plants at Ironton and at New Boston, Ohio. They employed hundreds of people, but they were nasty, dirty places. The pollution they put into the air rivaled any put out by any other factory in the region.

Jump from 1977 to 2007. Those two old coke plants are gone, but Sunoco has a new coke plant in the Scioto County community of Haverhill, Ohio. The new plant is much cleaner than the old ones. It has fewer workers, but again, that’s the story of manufacturing nowadays — the same output with fewer people.

In this comparison lies the real challenge for our area. We have to be able to compete with other regions to keep our jobs. Old factories will close. New factories will be built. We need to retain those jobs. The new factory may be 30 miles away, and it may be a different company, but we have to retain those factories.

We can still build rail cars in this area, as ACF once did. Someone, somewhere is building them.

The question for us is, how do we become competitive in that market again?