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.
6 responses so far ↓
D // March 4, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I worked at Johnson Rubber for 18+ years. Horizon Management and Charles Price took the money and ran. ask anybody here, they’ll tell you the same. If you or I stole four million dollars, we’d go to jail, but why oh why do these corporations continue to get away with stealing money and people’s livelihoods and just get to walk away? And still probably benefit from the bankruptcy of Johnson Rubber somehow. Any body got 500 or so decent paying jobs in Northeast Ohio? We’re all looking…
kegbot1 // March 4, 2008 at 3:58 pm
D -
No consolation for you right now but I agree with you 100 percent. I wonder how many other longtime hardworking Johnson Rubber employees feel the same way - $4 million just doesn’t ‘disappear’ in some kind of an accounting mistake. And then screw the employees on health care. Well that’s what happened when the US Supreme Court gave corporations personhood back in 1886 with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. That opened the gates of hell and we’ve been reaping the harvest ever since.
I wish you and everyone else who gave their all for Johnson Rubber the best.
In the know // March 16, 2008 at 10:54 pm
This is a case of simple greed. Charles Price and his sidekicks at Horizon Management simply milked the company dry. Some people that helped him were Tom Hazelbaker and Peter Hottis. Shame on them for not paying the medical insurance or the 401K matching contributions. They lied to us.
schratboy // March 31, 2008 at 7:25 am
National health care? Just like national housing of the types inner-city blacks and the native American Indian received? The idea that having the government pay for health care (actually, we pay for everything our government spends through our taxes while incurring debt to the privately owned Federal Reserve central bank) is ludicrous. When the health management system was created effectively adding multiple layers of non-performing, high cost bureaucracy on top of the doctors’ service began the downward spiral.
Today, we have systems set up for and operated by the super rich. Companies like Blue Cross of Western PA have billions of dollars in surplus in the bank as a non-profit no less. Mind you, these companies don’t actually provide services. They are administrative only. The doctors and hospital systems they’ve helped create have huge overhead to pay. By consolidating all the services in one place they can limit availability, thus driving up prices, while controlling their overhead. They also have every contingency in place to milk the government for every cent through Medicare and so forth. Universal Health is just the final nail in the coffin to pay off these huge health plans and lawyers. Having the non-performing HMO slobs involved is what has killed the business. Like the high paid executives who receive millions of compensation, our politicians and their lobbying pals are sucking the American public dry.
kegbot1 // March 31, 2008 at 7:35 am
I think you and I are actually in agreement for the most part. I favor the Canadian system with different kinds of controls (to account for rural areas and such). The candidates ARE advocating a “universal” system that will simply make Health Inc. more richer. I want to destroy the hold that insurance companies, Big Pharma and for-profit health companies have over the American people. I don’t think it will happen anytime soon in America since those vested interests can at least count on the basic assumption that once you buy the US Congress, it stays bought.
Inside Job // April 5, 2008 at 5:14 am
This company failed because of the likes of Carl Gordulic and Ray Podesta, that helped Charles Price and Horizon Management drive the company into the ground.
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