WASHINGTON, July 24: John Eskridge knows what he wants to hear President Barack Obama say when he returns to Galesburg, Illinois, today for what the White House has billed as a major economic address.
This town where plants once rolled out refrigerators, ovens, lawnmowers and other stock furnishings of the American home has been hit hard by globalization, losing factories that gave generations of people good jobs right out of high school.
Eskridge, 52, worked at the last plant to close in Galesburg. Maytag, now owned by Whirlpool Corp, shut the plant doors in 2004 and moved the jobs to Mexico – jobs the company has since moved to China.
“I wish he’d come here and say, ‘Something’s coming here, and we’re bringing jobs to Galesburg.’ That’s what I’d like to hear,” the life-long resident of the town of 30,000 told Reuters.
The White House has signaled that Obama is unlikely to make any such sweeping announcement in his speech, slated for 12:55 ET (2225 IST). Instead he will try to get past a bumpy start to his second term in office.
On Monday night, before a group of donors to Organizing for America, an advocacy group run by his former campaign staffers, he previewed his remarks in Illinois: “There’s no more important question for this country than how do we create an economy in which everybody who works hard feels like they can get ahead and feel some measure of security.”
FROM ANTI-SLAVERY TO MINIMUM WAGE
Eskridge now runs an auctioneering business and appraises antiques. He knows everything about the rich history of this town, once a stop on the Underground Railroad and home to poet Carl Sandburg and George Washington Ferris, who invented the Ferris wheel.
He rattles off visits by at least six other presidents, and speculates that Obama likes Galesburg because it’s where Abraham Lincoln argued for the abolition of slavery in 1858 during the fifth of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. One of Eskridge’s ancestors sat on the speakers’ platform.
Obama spoke at Knox College in Galesburg in 2005 when the plant-closing was on everybody’s mind. He has said he considered the commencement address his first big speech about the economy.
Many plant workers there had been making 50,000 dollars to 60,000 dollars a year with good benefits. A Knox College study done in 2010 found average income dropped by 10,000 dollars. Forty percent of workers said they felt they would never recover financially.
The town hasn’t got over the loss of its manufacturing sector, said Eskridge. “You can get jobs, but most of them are at minimum wage. A lot of places don’t want to give you too many hours at that, because they don’t want to have to provide any benefits.”
(AGENCIES)
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