Remember 25% unemployment?

April 29th, 2008 at 10:14am Isaac Guerrero

My role in this project is to examine Rockford’s economy since 1980. It’s no surprise, that a big theme of this story is the decline of manufacturing.

About 37 percent of the city’s workforce was involved in manufacturing in 1980, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Today, that number hovers around 21 percent. The decline is more significant when you realize that our workforce has grown from 143,000 workers in 1980 to nearly 189,000 workers today. So manufacturing is a smaller slice of a larger pie.

National Lock, Amerock, Barber Coleman and many more factories that helped make Rockford the “Screw Capital of the World,” are gone.

Did you used to work at one of those places? Maybe you remember what it was like when unemployment in Rockford reached 25 percent in early 1983? Or maybe you survived other economic downturns in the early 1990s and in the months following 9-11. How did you do it? I’d love to hear your story. Send me an e-mail at iguerrero@rrstar.com or call me at 815-987-1371.

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