Thursday, February 5

I am talking to a man about disposable diapers, the ones babies wear. This man knows a lot about diapers, because he once worked in a diaper factory. He worked there for over a decade, until last year when the plant shut down and moved its operations to Mexico. He says it was something about how, all of a sudden, it became too expensive to make diapers in western Pennsylvania. I figure it was more like something about how, all of a sudden, somebody figured out how to make a hell of a lot more money making diapers in Mexico.

Color me cynical, but I've seen it before. The small town where I live, and that I've represented in the Pennsylvania State House for the past eighteen years, was once a center for manufacturing. In its heyday Ellwood City, which is located about thirty-five miles north of Pittsburgh, employed more than twice as many steelworkers (over 17,000 during World War II) as its present total population of 8,200.

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