State off Siege

Unemployment hits 21%

In the West Virginia hollow of Gary, the silence hangs like a thick fog. "Used to be early in the morning, I would be real busy, men stopping in to get their lunch," said Constance Stepney, a cashier at the Bantam combination grocery store and gas station. "Now it's a real ghost town. You don't see no trains. You don't see the men coming in and going to work 'cause nobody's working."

In this southwestern Appalachian mining town of 3,500, nine out of ten adult residents are out of work, making it one of the hardest-hit areas in the hardest-hit state in the country. Mining industry layoffs have pushed unemployment in West Virginia to 21%, up eight percentage points in the past year and the highest rate for any state in the nation.

As some other states are slowly climbing out of the grueling two-year recession, West Virginia seems to be sinking deeper. Many of the industries most debilitated by the nation's economic woes--coal, electric power, steel, primary metals and chemicals--form the basis for the state's economy. Unlike other industrial states such as Michigan and Ohio, West Virginia has made little effort to diversify and retool its economy by luring high-tech businesses. "Usually West Virginia begins to recover about six months after the nation," says Arnold Margolin, the state's chief economist. "But there's an old saying, 'When the nation catches a cold, West Virginia catches pneumonia.' "

In the state capital of Charleston, Democratic Governor Jay Rockefeller had proposed a modest jobs program to the state legislature, which the lawmakers, unable to reach an agreement on, tabled before they recessed in mid-March. And he is earmarking $10 million, which he saved by slashing pork-barrel projects from the state budget, for jobs. Such action would come none too soon for towns like Gary that are hanging on by a string of hope. Nearly half of Gary's municipal employees have been laid off and the rest have been reduced to four-day work weeks.

A year ago, Constance Stepney's husband Roosevelt, 47, was making $85 a day as a dumper at one of U.S. Steel Corp.'s five local coal mines, confidently dubbed "the billion-dollar mine." But then U.S. Steel closed all the mines down. Now Roosevelt hangs around the house doing odd jobs and collects $188 a week in unemployment compensation to add to his wife's $112 weekly paycheck from her cashier's job. With a 13-year-old son, they are barely scraping along, fearful that the unemployment benefits may soon be exhausted. But Mrs. Stepney considers herself one of the lucky ones. "I have a job," she says simply. "I thank the Lord every day that I've been spared." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.