Trade led mill town to Trump
IN WINNEBAGO County, they’ve seen the paper mills close, one by one.
While Kimberly-Clark, founded here in 1872, still employs several thousand people locally, abandoned mills dot smaller towns in the region. Paper production has moved to cheaper locales overseas with less stringent pollution rules. That has left a pall – and a sense of fear and insecurity – hanging over places like Neenah, even as factories in other industries are still humming.
For many, the trade.
At Neenah Foundry, a 145year-old operation, its nearly 1,000 workers have watched in frustration as cheap manhole covers and sewer grates flood into the country from India and elsewhere, where competitors are eligible for government villain is subsidies and face fewer environmental regulations.
“For a long time, trade hasn’t been fair,” said Jeff Lamia, who makes $27 an hour at the foundry. “They can build stuff for pennies in China with no environmental rules,” he added. “Our foundry has an ungodly amount of emissions controls and that costs big money. Overseas, they throw it out into the air and we have to compete. That’s not a level playing field.”
More than a year after Donald Trump’s victory, it’s easy to forget that the seemingly tectonic electoral shift came largely from 80,000 voters in Wisc o n s i n , Mi c h i g a n a n d Pennsylvania who moved those Democratic industrial states into the Republican column.
Almost a third of Wisconsin’s 72 counties flipped from blue to red, and like most of them, Winnebago is heavily dependent on manufacturing, whether in gritty blue-collar towns like Oshkosh and Menasha or in Neenah, which is home to factories and corporate offices.
With one-fifth of its jobs in the factory sector, Winnebago is more dependent on manufacturing than over 90 percent of the nation’s counties. As a result, residents worry about foreign competition for locally made products like Oshkosh trucks or the fire engines built by Pierce in Appleton and exported around the world.
And with the North American Free Trade Agreement hanging in the balance, and the possibility of a trade war rising, White House decisions in the months ahead will reverberate here and in other Midwestern states – and may determine whether last year’s political shift becomes more enduring.
Trump’s attacks on free trade and promises to bring back good-paying jobs from over- seas resonated deeply here – even with lifelong Democrats like Lamia.
Those issues, along with a growing disdain for politicians in general and Hillary Clinton in particular, prompted Lamia to choose Trump after voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Other foundry workers like Jeff Olejnik, a Democrat who reluctantly supported Clinton, admits that Trump’s message on trade was compelling. “We need to take care of our people here,” he said. “There are at least a dozen paper mills in this area that have closed. You are losing good-paying jobs.”
“People in the Midwest don’t ask for much,” he added. “They want to take a vacation once a year, have decent health care and enough money to pay their bills and save for retirement. That’s our life, but pretty soon there won’t be no middle class.”