Capitalism uber alles!
Standing near her car, Donna Edwards said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. This was my life. I feel like part of me is gone. This is so painful.”
Employees like Edwards leaving the Johnson Rubber Company plant in Middlefield, Ohio are frustrated and angry. For generations, residents in this blue collar community in rural Geauga County have been punching the clock at the factory.
Joseph Johnson opened the doors 113 years ago when the company first made wooden buckets. The factory survived the Great Depression, two fires, two World Wars and became the financial backbone of Middlefield.
Like many others in town, Gilberta Town, director of the Middlefield Historical Society, worked in the plant along with many of her relatives.
“It is a death for us,” said Town, “the death of the community and death to this whole area. When the outsiders took over the company, things just went wrong.”
Long time residents like barber and former mayor, Rick Seyer believe that when the Johnson famly sold the company, things started going badly.
Seyers says that the new owners of Johnson Rubber Company did a poor job managing the firm. He wonders why a recent company audit showed that $4 million dollars was missing.
“Yeah, there is a lot of anger about that,” said Seyer. “A lot of people in this town have invested most of their lives in the Johnson Rubber Company.”
How much you wanna bet there’s a numbered Swiss bank account that has about the same amount of money recently deposited in it? There’s sloppy accounting and then there’s sloppy accounting but you just don’t ‘lose’ $4 million in a company this size.
One can only hope that the bankruptcy attorney gets to the bottom of it.
In the meantime, the little people written about in the above story, the victims of all of this, are now subjected to a double whammy - the health insurance they paid for has not been delivered:
Instead, for three months — June through August — none of the workers’ claims were paid. What’s more, weekly pay stubs provided by employees show that Johnson Rubber continued to withdraw $10 to $20 per employee each payday to cover health insurance.
Yet, Johnson’s management didn’t pay administrative fees during that period. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Ohio, which administered health claims for the self-insuring company, said it stopped coverage at the end of July because of that.
And Johnson already had virtually stopped paying medical providers.
Meanwhile, employees and their families continued to get sick and have accidents that required attention. Collectively they incurred between $300,000 and $400,000 in hospital, doctor and prescription expenses.
Republican response: too damn bad. Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and pay for it yourself. There’s a McDonald’s in Middlefield - apply for a job there! No work is beneath you!
Even longtime Johnson employees had no idea their health-care payments came from the company. On Feb. 21, the day she learned her job would soon end, Maggie Callahan, with the company 12 years, said Johnson had stopped paying its insurance premiums, leaving her and her co-workers financially vulnerable.
Republican response: So what? Capitalism’s first and only loyalty is to the ownership class. You are owed nothing and should expect nothing. Get your own company.
Nancy Marten, another employee who was leaving the Middlefield plant with Callahan, said one colleague had suffered a motorcycle accident during the summer and got hit with $17,000 in medical bills for injury treatment.
“What’s he going to do?” Marten asked, agitated. “He thought he had health insurance.”
Republican response: he should assume all the risks of riding a motorcycle. The company owes him nothing! Get a job!
You know, just once, it would be nice to see some corporate suits, especially in this case, do a perp walk. But the system protects its own. There will probably be golden parachutes for the owners of Johnson Rubber and golden showers for all the employees.
