The Rubbermaid company began operations in the 1920s in Wooster, Ohio, a town of 24,000. The company employed about 1600 people in the early 90s; it was the largest employer in Wooster. In 1995 the company lost a contract with Walmart, which it had supplied with dozens of household items. Walmart pushes its suppliers to charge the cheapest price possible.
Rubbermaid had already opened plants in Mexico, Korea, and Poland, but its products were still too expensive for Walmart, so it cut its workforce by 9% and closed nine of its facilities.
In 1999 Rubbermaid was bought by Newell Corporation, a company noted for cost-cutting. Newell shifted more manufacturing to Mexico and moved the corporate staff to Atlanta. Employment in Wooster was cut to under 1000.
On December 10, 2003, Newell announced that the Wooster plant would be shuttered in a few months
Wooster had other factories, but some of them moved production outside the U.S. as well. The unemployment rate for Wayne County, home of Wooster, stood at 11.1% in 2010.
The U.S. in June 1979 had 19,553,000 jobs in manufacturing. That was the peak. By 2011 manufacturing jobs had dropped to 11.6 million.
I don’t know this for sure, but I will bet that many former Rubbermaid workers voted for Trump and shop at Walmart. I will also bet that the Rubbermaid factory won’t be coming back to Wooster.
Information about Rubbermaid came from Donald L. Barlett and James B Steele, The Betrayal of the American Dream.
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