West Point, OH - As the snow fell and the wind blew and the temperature hovered in the low teens, 3,500 people clutched at their collars and tried to come to grips with the day after.

In the sudden absence of Tyson Foods, easily West Point's largest employer, local businessman Dave Wimmer was among 25 local leaders gathered around a table in the Cuming County courthouse worrying about where 365 people would work.

Jose Acosta, one of those 365 workers, was already planning to leave behind the house he and his wife and Tyson co-worker had owned for the last 8 years. A family that includes two school-age children will move to Dakota City, where the parents will work at another Tyson plant.

Najma Sheikh and 30 other Somalians who just joined the local Tyson payroll in January were preparing to move to the Tyson plant in Emporia, Kan., to resume their decidedly brief meatpacking careers.

Was there any anger among the Africans who came to West Point expecting something more than three- week employment?

Well, no, Sheikh said. After all, everybody with a mattress scattered across a crowded apartment floor on West Point's east side had fled a country wracked by a 15-year civil war.

“We have, first of all, our freedom,” the 24-year-old interpreter for a dozen men said as they pressed in around her to listen in.

“We are, second of all, independent and we can do better” in the U.S. “We can work, we can study, we can make businesses. And that's why we're going to be hopeful and like it.”

Reassuring as that might sound, uncertainty filled the air with the snowflakes, from the Tyson plant on West Point's southern outskirts to every corner of town.

Uncertainty gripped the community about as quickly as Tyson announced Wednesday that it was closing plants in West Point and Norfolk and putting almost 1,700 people out of work. The combined payroll impact is $34 million per year.

Wednesday was also the last day of work at a West Point plant that IBP acquired from Armour and Company in 1967. The last day of work in Norfolk is today.

Tyson, which bought IBP in 2001, said consolidation of operations was tied to greater efficiency for the world's largest processor of red meat.

Abdullahi Abdille, 21, and another part of a Somalian work force that relocated to West Point from Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio and other states, voiced no regrets about his personal decision Thursday.

He defines adversity much more by the deaths of his father and a younger brother in the country he fled in October. “We came here,” he said, “because nobody could live in Somalia, because of the civil war.”

In West Point and, he expects, in Emporia, “We live a safe life with a good job.”

A mood of unshakeable faith in the future wasn't quite as much in evidence among other workers who were leaving a meeting with management and hurrying through a cold parking lot outside the Tyson plant.

As Fidel Trevino, 22, and Rudik Yunyan, 43, huddled over Yunyan's car heater, Trevino said his problem is simple enough. “I need money,” he said.

Being able to keep his pay and benefits for 60 days gives Trevino some comfort. “After that, I have to find a different job, a different plan.”

Stacie Wieneke, 35, who has worked in the plant's employee-owned cafeteria for the last 14 years, doesn't get the 60-day package, because she's not part of the meatpacking crew.

“I've put my application in at different places around West Point,” she said. “I need to find a job. I've got bills to pay.”

There's no distinction to make on that point based on skin color or country of origin, Wieneke said.

“There are people who have worked out here for 38 years - ever since it opened up. They've seen the first head killed here and yesterday they saw the last.”

She feels a bit easier knowing her husband has a solid trucking job in town. But she's also sure just about everybody on the Tyson payroll lives paycheck to paycheck.

“I guess what I'm so upset about is why wasn't there any warning?”

Retired West Point teacher Tom Black was thinking similar thoughts as he sat in the basement of the courthouse and carried out his duties as chairman of West Point's Multi-Cultural Action Committee.

“They're a private enterprise,” he said. “Tyson made their decision and there's not much we can do about it. I think they could have given more advance warning than they did.”

Much of the concern the committee expressed Thursday in an afternoon meeting with Tyson officials was for the Somalians. That concern included the long-term leases they signed with local landlords.

Tyson's Mark Gordon said there were probably openings for every displaced worker in West Point at sister plants in Dakota City, Madison, Lexington and Emporia.

“We've put together some relocation packages, some incentives packages that we feel are very inviting,” Gordon said.

Dave Wimmer of West Point's Wimmer's Meat Products Inc. was among other employers gathered in the room who had a few openings that could help absorb the portion of the workforce that wants to stay where they are.

In many cases, Wimmer said, job offers would go out to “folks who are scared and not from this country to start with, and who are looking at the world in a little different way than they were two days ago.”

Source: Columbus Telegram

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