Union Perspectives

Are towns with companies where most people work better off than towns with no companies? I have seen the towns with no large companies that lasted longer because they have to diversify and not depend on one or two places for people of the town to work. I came from Dresden, a little town in Ohio. It had a company at each end of the town. One was a woolen mill. The other was a paper mill. Dresden sat between two larger towns, about 15 miles apart. Slowly the two mills shut down, but then a new company came about as a result of a local man David “Popeye” Longaberger, who started the Longaberger basket company. It became a billion dollar company and most of the town’s people worked for this company or at other businesses owned by Longaberger. When Longaberger died, the company he started in a garage started to go downhill, especially after his daughter shifted manufacturing to China, destroying the uniqueness and brand of the baskets they made. Luckily, there were the two towns borderin...