Ivy, president of UAW Local 1040 at the Cooper Tools plant on West Stewart Street, helped 25 workers threatened with losing their jobs qualify for assistance through the federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance program.
The plant is now part of Apex Tool Group LLC, a joint venture between Cooper Industries and Danaher Corp.
Because of increased demand for the tools the plant makes for General Motors, Honda and other automakers, all the workers were called back to work in Dayton after they had qualified for TAA, Ivy said.
In the churning global economy, however, Ivy knows the tough times could return.
“We don’t take (anything) for granted,” said Ivy, 53. “Something could happen as far as the recession. We will deal with it again.”
What happened at Cooper Tools is more the exception than the rule for the 208 groups of Ohio workers who qualified for TAA from May 18, 2009, to May 17 of this year, according to a new report from Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland-based research organization. The overwhelming majority of those who qualify will never get called back to their old jobs.
The report examined the 12 months after the program was expanded under the federal stimulus to provide more benefits and cover workers in service jobs as well as manufacturing. Workers qualify if they lose jobs due to rising imports or shifts of U.S. operations to foreign locations.
TAA started in 1974. Under the program, workers receive additional unemployment benefits, training for new jobs, a health coverage tax credit and other support through the Department of Labor. Groups of three workers, unions, companies and the state all may apply for certification on behalf of affected workers.
The federal stimulus that was used to expand the program last year authorized an increase in the amount of funds that may be used for training from $220 million to $575 million.
In Ohio, 3,544 workers currently are enrolled in TAA training, compared to the 2,299 who were enrolled at the same date last year, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Ohio also distributed about $26.9 million in federal money for TAA training contracts from July 1, 2009, to July 1, 2010, compared to about $11.4 million paid over the same period in the previous year, ODJFS said.
All told, an estimated 26,427 workers in Ohio, including 2,512 in the Dayton area, qualified for TAA.
Ohio and Pennsylvania rank behind only Michigan in the number of certifications or approved applications for TAA money. While most workers were in the auto industry and other manufacturing jobs, Dayton area TAA recipients also had jobs in public relations, bookkeeping, computer programming, desktop publications and publishing.
The largest number of TAA-qualified workers (564) in the area came from the SUMCO Phoenix Corp. plant in Hamilton Twp. in Warren County, where silicon wafers for the semiconductor industry were produced.
The market for some of the plant’s products declined, said Nancy Norman, the company’s external affairs coordinator, and production was shifted to other U.S. plants and out of the country. The company gave employees a year’s notice of the shutdown on June 30 of this year and filed the application that certified employees for the program.
Norman said she is grateful that TAA funds were available. “I don’t see how a nation weathers what it went through without some kind of assistance,” she said “It’s just a matter of doing what you have to do.”
James Winship, president of IUE-CWA Local 755, agreed about the importance and necessity of TAA.
His union qualified an estimated 119 workers at what is now the SB LiMotive plant in Springboro in Warren County for TAA. The workers produced batteries and energy storage systems.
Fewer than half of the workers were called back, but the others are trying to make new lives with the extra support, Winship said.
“Some people are trying to learn a new skill. Those people are trying to get back into the work force. They’re taking medical classes, education classes,” he said.
Winship is critical of U.S. trade policy, which he says puts American workers, particularly those in manufacturing jobs, at a disadvantage.
TAA, ultimately, will make a difference only if the economy produces the jobs American workers need, Winship said.
“You can train these people for the next 10 years,” he said. “If we train them and there are no jobs, what we’ve got is an educated, unemployed work force.”
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