Manufacturing Jobs

Your recent editorial regarding poverty ("The nonworking poor," Sept. 18) should be required reading for all members of Congress who are gainfully employed with great benefits. The mere fact more and more of their constituents are living in poverty, becoming homeless, and receiving no medical benefits is totally inexcusable. Why do these disturbing conditions exist? Because jobs, mostly in manufacturing, have gone and continue to go overseas. Our middle class is and always has been reliant on manufacturing jobs as the locomotive of a prosperous economy.

Giant Food Inc. has announced it will move into part of a long-abandoned kitchen-stove factory -- behind Snowden Square in east Columbia -- marking the end to an old dream of turning that area into a major manufacturing base for the planned town.The area -- the site of four huge factory buildings that were to have housed General Electric plants near Route 175 and Snowden River Parkway -- once was envisioned as a source of as many as 12,000 high-paying industrial jobs for the Columbia area.

It's called Chesapeake Bay Candle. But for 17 years, all the products in the signature line of Annapolis-born and Rockville-based Pacific Trade International were made by cheaper labor in Asia. On Tuesday, the brand celebrates a sort of homecoming: the official opening of a new plant in Glen Burnie, where a workforce projected to grow to 100 will make the candles the company sells at Target, Kohl's and other retailers. Pacific Trade International is one of a small but growing number of U.S. manufacturers that are bringing production back from overseas.

Parks Sausage Co., the largest black-owned manufacturing company in Baltimore, is seeking an investor or buyer to rescue it from too much debt and declining sales, company Chairman Raymond V. Haysbert Sr. said yesterday.Mr. Haysbert said he has retained Baltimore-based Equity Partners Inc. to find investors willing to provide the approximately $7.5 million he believes is needed to keep the Parks Circle sausage factory operating.He also will offer the company for sale, including to competitors who would probably want to close the 220-worker Baltimore factory and headquarters, and move production of his sage-and-pepper-flavored pork sausages to lower-wage plants in the South.

I never thought I'd hear a Baltimorean say such a thing. Last week, while reporting on the Rawlings-Blake administration's 10-year financial plan, I spoke with the mayor's press secretary, Ian Brennan. We covered a lot of ground in our hourlong phone conversation, but one comment in particular rewound itself repeatedly in my mind like a game-deciding, goal-line drive. One day, said Mr. Brennan, "We would love to be spoken of like … Pittsburgh as a city not suffering post-industrial urban decay any longer.

A Cockeysville maker of steel and nickel-based wire products said it will close permanently - the latest victim of the pressures befalling traditional manufacturing. Maryland Specialty Wire has begun laying off its 120 workers and expects to complete the task by June, the company said yesterday. The news follows recent announced layoffs or closings from several manufacturers in Maryland, including General Motors Corp. in Baltimore and Phoenix Color Corp. in Hagerstown. "The business has not been profitable for the last several years," said Pete Marciniak, vice president of human resources for Handy & Harman, Maryland Specialty Wire's parent company, which is owned by the New York-based holding company WHX Corp.

Letter writer Robert W. Palter of Timonium ("Bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs," April 19) is right. We desperately need manufacturing jobs in the United States. However, the owners of U.S. businesses will not allow it. God forbid the citizens should demand higher wages for their labor. It is impossible to buy anything in the U.S. now that wasn't made in China, Vietnam, Mexico and countries I've never heard of because American businesses, with the blessing of the U.S. government, have moved their companies offshore in order to hire people who are desperate to work for a dollar a day. Our government and big business created this situation because it benefits them and to hell with the people.

Anne Arundel County economic development officials were surprised this week when C. M. Kemp Manufacturing Co. announced it would soon close its Glen Burnie plant. In many ways, they shouldn't have been.Another casualty of consolidation, the industrial-dryer maker will shut down by year's end, eliminating 99 high-paying manufacturing jobs and continuing a rapid realignment of the county's listless economy.Since 1990, Anne Arundel has lost 28 percent of its manufacturing base, including half the most lucrative jobs in electronics businesses.

At least by the standard of its own recent economic development coups, Harford County was having a slow summer. A major manufacturer hadn't announced plans to open in Harford in, what, at least several months. Then last week rose two major items: B. Green, the wholesale grocery distributor, confirmed that it was negotiating to move from Lansdowne in Baltimore County to a vacant warehouse in Harford County's Perryman, which has become a magnet for distribution centers. At least as significant was the news that After Six formal wear wants to take over a garment factory in Bel Air that closed two months ago.When Gleneagles Inc. rainwear shut down in June, about 300 people lost their jobs in Bel Air and Towson.

ON THE SITE... Suggs says Achilles injury 'not as bad as some thought' : Ravens linebacker expects a four- to six-month recovery from partial tendon tear after undergoing successful surgery Tuesday. Closing arguments expected in election fraud trial :  Julius Henson is accused of orchestrating a 2010 Election Day robocall that prosecutors say attempted to trick black voters into staying home from the polls. Baltimore area has high share of high-tech manufacturing jobs :  A Brookings Institution report classifies 27 percent of the region's manufacturing jobs as "very high-tech," compared with 16 percent nationwide.