The factories slowed in the 1980s and 1990s, and with them, the heartbeat of the town. Now, after decades of decline, the most important factory in this factory town — Case Construction — is expanding and offering hope.
But the preoccupation with large manufacturing raises uncomfortable questions for the city as it works to recover from the recession. Can it depend on large manufacturing for its economic future? Should it? What's the alternative?
Unemployment here is 7.6%, compared with the 5.4% state average. Manufacturing jobs don't pay what they used to, and there are fewer of them. The days of good wages and benefits on a production line have pretty much ended in this part of America, the manufacturing belt of the Upper Midwest.
Richard Longworth, author and analyst at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, says big manufacturing will never return on the same scale. "Nowhere is heavy manufacturing part of the solution," he wrote in Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism.
The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank has been looking into the problem, studying cities from Pontiac, Mich., toCedar Rapids. Researchers published a working paper in February that argues that manufacturing cities must focus on leadership, worker training, their ability to raise money for development, and their willingness to see themselves as players in regional and global economies.
From the president of the regional hospital in West Burlington, to a downtown condo developer, to the Los Angeles transplant who opened a boutique, businesspeople agree: The future must be different.
"The future is in small manufacturers and the service industries," said Mark Richardson, president of the Great River Medical Center, with 1,870 employees, the largest employer in the county.
Burlington's grand 179-year-old downtown sits in a bowl ringed by bluffs that face the blue-gray sweep of the Mississippi River. Church steeples spike the sky, brick warehouses line the riverfront, and lovely old homes on the hills look east toward a quiet river patrolled by bald eagles and framed by a modern-looking highway bridge and the flatness of Illinois.
The city's pride and pessimism are, to a large extent, wrapped up in the plant that Jerome Increase Case opened in 1937 in an abandoned furniture factory along the river. The company has changed hands several times and is now a division of Italian giant Fiat Industrial. With its wide network of dependent suppliers and 75 years of history, Case is the biggest game in town.
"Certainly from an emotional tie-in, Case and Burlington are about as synonymous as you can get," said Jason Hutcheson, economic development director at the Greater Burlington Partnership. But the old Case is not the same as the factory today.
"You're not going to be able to walk out of high school, onto a factory floor and make $50,000 a year," Hutcheson said. "It's going to be different, but I still think manufacturing and value-added agriculture are going to be incredibly important to our economy here."
Burlington's other big manufacturers — Exide, Champion, the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant and General Electric— have all shrunk, been sold or left, and wages are lower.
Today, the news at Case is encouraging. The plant manager is Jason Martin, a Michigan farm boy who's worked for different divisions of Fiat Industrial in Wisconsin, Australia and Saskatchewan.
Case mostly makes tractor loaders, tractor loader backhoes and tractor forklifts in Burlington. The company announced in May 2010 that it will open a new line that builds corn-picker heads for combines, as early as this spring. Some 600 people already work at the plant and in its engineering division. Martin said in the next 18 months, the plant will add more than 200 positions.
"Like a lot of places in the U.S., the Burlington area was hit quite hard with industrial jobs being either moved or relocated," Martin said. "My opinion is, Burlington's on the upswing from that."
Martin said the greater Burlington Chamber of Commerce has encouraged expansion at the Case plant, gotten General Electric to keep operations in West Burlington, and brought in parts suppliers such as Italian firms Cobo, Borghi and Alfagomma.
If the future is small manufacturing, Craig Upton's story is Burlington's future. He started a cabinet-making company in 1984 and built shelves for Aldi in the late 1980s. When the grocery store chain asked if he would build checkout lanes for them, he figured those out, and by 2000, he was making checkout lanes out of wood for Aldi, Target and Hy-Vee. In 2004, he got a call from the Siemens plant north of Fort Madison.
"They were looking for a supplier," he said. "It was just like a perfect phone call." Upton's company, KPI Concepts, went from 35 to 70 employees, and just built a new wing on its factory in West Burlington. The plant produces kits that workers at the Siemens plant use to assemble the wooden insides of windmill blades.
Upton thinks Burlington is doing OK, though the nature of available jobs is changing. "It's pretty hard to come out of high school and get some of these jobs," he said. "We're actually, truthfully, having a hard time finding people."
Cynthia Schuyler is another success story. She grew up in Burlington, moved away, ran a restaurant in Beverly Hills, then moved back nine years ago. She opened a clothing store called Original Cyns downtown. The store is doing well, she said. Her customers are "out of the box," women willing to walk up 23 stairs to buy clothes.
Bob Brueck thinks Burlington's future is downtown. To prove it, he bought a four-story building, and he's renovating a theater.
The 75-year-old started a construction business in 1976 so he could pay for college for one of his daughters. Business never slowed, and now he has enough time and money to own the old Schramm department-store building, help renovate the Capitol Theater, and evangelize for both.
He looked out over the city at dusk from Martini's, a restaurant on the fifth floor of the old Mercy building. A guy in a suit played the piano, and the restaurant, with its 270-degree view of town, hummed at happy hour on a Wednesday. Below, the streetlights gave off soft light, and a spotlight lit up a church steeple to the south.
"Look across there and see how many church steeples there are," he said. "It's beautiful."
Belz also reports for the Des Moines Register
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