Chrysler is laying off 2,400 workers in Fenton. Anheuser-Busch is cutting pensions and health benefits for salaried workers, hoping to avoid being swallowed by Belgian brewer InBev.
Just north of the St. Louis suburbs, neighbors and National Guardsmen lost a fight against the Mississippi, as the river drowned tiny towns and thousands of acres of crops.
It’s been a rough few weeks in the St. Louis region. We know the river is falling. But is the sky falling, too?
Not so much, experts say. The troubles at Anheuser-Busch and Chrysler are part of two longer-term phenomena that reach far beyond St. Louis: the loss of manufacturing jobs in a global economy and a bigger-is-better consolidation movement in the corporate sphere.
Wrenching as it still is, the loss of manufacturing jobs is not new. Across the region, 50,000 factory jobs have disappeared in the past 10 years; 133,000 remain. The losses at Chrysler are just the latest batch, although because auto industry jobs pay so well, they are especially painful.
“This has been going on for years, but every five years or so we hit one of these bumps, like Chrysler, and it shakes things up,” says Russ Signorino, a labor analyst at the United Way who has watched the St. Louis job market for three decades.
Meanwhile, we’ve added about 100,000 other jobs, according to Labor Department figures, in fields such as health care, education, technology and business services. Such hiring goes unnoticed, mostly in small numbers, mostly at smaller companies. The rub is that the better-paying new jobs require more education, while the disappearing factory jobs did not. Chrysler workers averaged $80,000 with overtime in good years. The lesson: Education pays, now more than ever.

The lost Chrysler jobs equal two-tenths of 1 percent of the 1.35 million jobs in St. Louis. For a time, workers still will collect most of their pay, thanks to union labor contracts, which should soften the impact of the layoffs on local grocery stores, restaurants, repair shops and the like. Even considering job losses at local Chrysler suppliers, the economic effect on St. Louis could be relatively small.
It’s too early to say that the Chrysler jobs are gone for good, although the public comments of company officials were anything but hopeful. Chrysler is closing its South plant, which makes minivans, and cutting back the North pickup-truck plant to a single shift.
Still, the South plant was shut in 1991 and reopened three years later. “At that time, people thought it would never reopen, but it did,” says Mr. Signorino.

The Anheuser-Busch saga also is a familiar story. CEOs who can’t keep their stock price up risk having their companies sold out from under them. The new owners then try to pay for the deal by imposing ruthless cost-cutting measures. Some reports suggest that InBev could slash as many as 2,000 jobs company-wide.
CEO August Busch IV is trying to hold onto his family’s company by proving to stockholders that he can impose those cuts on his own. As usual, the workers will feel the brunt of them, joining millions of other Americans who’ve seen their pensions reduced and health benefits cut in an effort to mollify Wall Street.
America probably has fallen into in a mild recession, and it’s having a mild effect on St. Louis. About 9,000 jobs have disappeared in the past year, according to the government’s preliminary figures that are subject to revision. That’s just a fraction of one percent. When the slump ends, we should make up that loss fairly quickly.
To keep jobs here, Missouri’s state and local governments have been shelling out financial incentives to businesses. Chrysler was promised $78 million in incentives to upgrade its South plant. It’s closing anyway.
Missouri would do better by improving public schools, upgrading its unimpressive state university system and funding job retraining. We won’t attract the jobs of the future unless we have people qualified to do them.
The best way to ensure St. Louis’ future is to invest in its people.