Ohio town devastated by layoffs by German firm DHL

By Andrea Hopkins - Reuters EXCERPT




WILMINGTON, Ohio (Reuters) - Scott Terry is one of 7,000 who work in the small Ohio town of Wilmington who just found out he's lost his job, and he's scrambling to figure out how his family will survive.

In every corner of Wilmington, home to the soon-to-close distribution hub of German shipping company DHL Express, townspeople are asking the same question.

"It's devastating for me and my family," said Terry, 41, who has spent the last 18 years in a job he loved at DHL's main air cargo carrier, ABX Air. "Everyone I worked with pretty much planned on retiring from there years from now. It's going to devastate Wilmington, the whole county."

Wilmington has been at the heart of DHL's five-year-old effort to take on U.S. package giants UPS and FedEx on their home turf -- an attempt DHL abandoned this week in the face of a slowing U.S. economy, shedding nearly 10,000 jobs in the process. DHL is a unit of Germany's Deutsche Post.

The loss of 7,000 jobs from Wilmington, a town of just 12,000 set amid the rolling farmland of Ohio's southwest, has has scared a lot of people.

The economic base of the town and its surrounding area has suddenly disappeared, just as the nation teeters into recession -- making Wilmington the poster child for small towns across America facing the kind of economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression.

At the General Denver Hotel and Grille in Wilmington's quaint downtown, the 17 staff members have volunteered to take a reduction in pay, to cut their hours -- anything to help the inn survive what is going to be a brutal decline in business.

"We've been trying to figure out how much business (will be lost)," said owner Molly Dullea, 51. "It's probably a good 30 percent -- it could be the amount that would close our doors."

FULL STORY: https://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4AA85Y20081111