Hanes Buys Missouri Factory, Then Plans to Move it to Mexico

image: Hanes is going to have order new tee-shirt labels

Globalization strikes again:

Barely a year after purchasing a manufacturing plant from a competitor, clothing maker Hanes is set to close down the facility, leaving many in the town scrambling for work at a time when jobs in small towns can be hard to come by.

Hanes Brands, which – at least for now – is based out of Lenexa, Kansas, bought the facility from Gear for Sports in August of 2010. Workers at the plant made sports-related clothing like college football t-shirts and other items. Cecilia Harper just started at the plant four months ago after being out of work for two years.

“I think it’s going to be impossible (to find a new job). I mean it took me this long to find this job. What’s it going to take and how am I going to live?” said Harper.

Chillicothe Mayor Chuck Haney says that he believes that the handwriting was on the wall for the plant the moment Hanes purchased the plant.

“It was like a bomb shell had been dropped on us,” said Haney. “That’s exactly the fact, that there was plans the day they announced the sale, the next day they began work to get ready to move this plant to Mexico.”

Haney says that the jobs at the Chillicothe plant paid between $8 and $12 an hour, much more than in Mexico.

Consider for a moment the implications for American workers if a job that only pays the pitiful sum of eight bucks an hour is subject to being moved overseas so the company can make more money. For all of his blather about his make-work, boondoggle jobs bill, why isn't President Hopey-Changey speaking up about practices like this? Oh that's right, because he is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America. How silly of me.

The most telling quote in this article came at the end:

“How can I be self-sufficient if I have no income?” said Harper, who says that the American middle class is extinct. “I don’t think there will be a middle class. That’s what i feel. I feel there are going to be rich people and poor people and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

Well, it might not have to be that way, Ms. Harper, if the non-rich would unite and angrily demand that this type of garbage be stopped. But they won't because far too many of them are either distracted by the corporate media machine or have actively been paid off by the ownership class to do their bidding.

I actually have a great idea for a teevee show. Give me an hour on MSNBC every night and I'd do a talk show where each episode I would highlight a corporate abuse like this one and then get the corporate flacks and the politician-apologists on there and skewer them. Doesn't that sound like it would be a ratings monster, given how so many people are feeling the pain of layoffs and foreclosures these days? Too bad it will never happen. Not because I'm a blogger nobody, but because the corporations that control the media would never let me within a mile of their studios.

What a sad state of affairs in modern day America.