Jobs: End of the Line

This film was originally broadcast on Al Jazeera English in the run-up to the US elections in 2008.

There are few places in the United States currently suffering more economic woes than the mid-west state of Ohio. Traditionally a major industrial centre, the state has seen more than a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs disappear in the past eight years.

Ohio has always proved to be a key battleground for US presidential elections – an all-important swing state. This year will be no different and the worsening economic situation has already prompted the presidential candidates to invest heavily in courting the state’s voters with promises of new jobs.

In Dayton, a city of 160,000 people in western Ohio, manufacturing jobs once thrived, but today those well-paying positions are almost impossible to find.

Delphi, the car parts producer for General Motors and one of the city’s main employers, shut five of its six plants. It also filed for bankruptcy in the US, after outsourcing hundreds of thousands of jobs to other countries such as Mexico or China.

We the People travelled to Dayton to listen to how people are getting by with almost no prospect for restoring their core manufacturing industry.