Job cuts devastate small towns

The Chippewa Valley, once called “Wisconsin’s Silicon Valley,” has just been hit by the termination of more than 1,000 factory jobs at SGI, Hutchinson Technology and other computer parts manufacturers. Layoffs have also been announced at Leeson Electric Corp., which makes electric motors.

The damage and pain of this blow have yet to be fully felt by the people here.

This writer, who is convalescing from a life-threatening fall, was visited recently by a friend who brought some holiday food and the news that her job at Hutchinson was gone. She is the only support for her two grade-school-age children and has to pay a mortgage on her modest home. Her situation is dire.

The Chippewa Valley has a relatively small population, so the loss of 1,000 jobs will bring the local unemployment rate into the 15 percent to 20 percent range. The area will be living through another depression soon. But, in many ways, the situation here will be worse than in the 1930s.

Seventy years ago the rich farmland of the Chippewa Valley supported a large number of family farms. They produced good milk, chickens, eggs, corn, pasture, apples and so on. Some 42 different foods were produced on my home farm.

One winter during the Depression my mother and sisters “put up” 500 quarts of wild berries. There were fresh eggs from 20 laying hens and, after the first hard frost, rabbit stew every Monday.

During the “good times” before the Depression, many people from this area left the farms and got jobs in big cities like Minneapolis and Chicago. Once the Depression hit, many had the farm to come back to. All but one of my seven uncles did this. The farm was there to give them food and shelter.

Now the family farms are largely gone from the Valley area. They have, for the most part, been bought up by agribusiness companies and turned into factory farms. This was done in different ways and at different speeds. One of the first things to go was the chickens.

Every farm had some chickens at one time—either a few or a large flock. My grandmother sent her daughter through a teachers’ college with the money brought in from the chickens. Then the chicken factories moved in, captured the market, and soon there were no more chickens on the farms.

Today, the people getting laid off have no farms to go to. The terminations have just begun and we have not yet started to fight back. We will!