Oblivion

clipped from www.usatoday.com On Feb. 4, 2009, the smelter closed. Workers gathered in the high school gym. Gov. Joe Manchin, a pro-union Democrat, came up from Charleston. "The world's changing," he said. In the America where things are made, the recession has been a depression. According to a new Northeastern University study, one in every six blue-collar industrial jobs have disappeared since 2007, matching the drop in overall employment in the Great Depression. Last year, about 1.3 million factory jobs vanished, including Shumaker's. For the first time, the government announced in January, most union members are government employees, not private-sector workers. One-horse towns such as Ravenswood risk losing their reason for being, says Juravich, who teaches about labor at the University of Massachusetts. Without a hospital or university campus or county seat, "they're one plant shutdown from oblivion."