BIG NEIGHBOR: The plant, from a nearby neighborhood.
EVERYTHING MUST GO: AAA Pawn manager Loren Throne helps load a Whirlpool washer on a customer’s truck.
drastic measures to remain competitive in the global marketplace in this article. If you’ve been paying attention over the past two decades, you could probably write that quote yourself by now. Besides, this isn’t about excuses. Instead, this aims to be a story about people — Fort Smith workers, many of whom gave a sizable chunk of their lives to a job, only to be left behind in the shuffle. People like Howard Carruth, 62, who worked at Whirlpool as a millwright for 43 years, 83 days, and served as the vice president of the United Steelworkers Union Local 370. Like Kathy Palmer, a former press operator who started at Whirlpool when she was 19 and who worries that at age 57, she’s going to have trouble finding a job. Like Melissa Dorr, 49, who worked 26 years and one month at the plant, and who says she can’t bring herself to even drive by the old factory: “It makes me sick that I wasted all that time there.” This is about looking some of those workers in the eye, hearing their stories, and questioning how much we’re willing to pay as a society to get things just a little cheaper. ♦♦♦
T FEELING THE RIPPLES: Gwen Motsenbocker (left) and Danny Flippen.
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NOVEMBER 28, 2012
ARKANSAS TIMES
he former Whirlpool plant in Fort Smith is something to behold, even with its presses stilled and its loading docks emptied — a building so vast it seems to have a horizon, most of it painted a shade bluer than sky. In the neighborhoods near the plant, the building looms like a wall in the distance. While one might wonder
how people in those houses slept all those years with the constant comings and goings of workers and trucks and the bang of industry at a plant that often ran 24 hours a day — a fact attested to by the existence of at least one surviving all-night diner a few blocks from the factory — it’s probably for this simple reason: For many of the people who lived in those neighborhoods, a lot of whom probably drew their paycheck from Whirlpool, any racket from their big blue neighbor undoubtedly sounded like prosperity. Those days, however, are in the past. While Fort Smith manufacturing isn’t down and out — there are still a number of big industrial employers there, including Gerber Foods, heating and air manufacturer Rheem, and electric motor manufacturer Baldor — Whirlpool was clearly a cornerstone of the local economy, and the loss has rippled through the town like a shockwave. Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders worked for Whirlpool for 32 years prior to being elected. He said the news that Whirlpool would depart was “disheartening,” he said. “I was very disappointed because we had the most efficient plant that Whirlpool had domestically, but I wasn’t privy to the factors on which they made their decision.” The bright spot for Fort Smith, Sanders said, is that other companies in town are slowly beginning to add jobs, and the city continues to work with the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission on potential pros-