That disruption is being felt in the Dayton area. Thousands of auto workers and employees at related parts manufacturers and machine-tool makers lost their jobs after General Motors Co. closed its plant in nearby Moraine two days before Christmas in 2008. Less than six months later, NCR Corp., once called National Cash Register Co. and founded in Dayton in 1884, said it would move its headquarters to Duluth, Georgia, taking more than a thousand jobs with it.
Unemployment in the Dayton metropolitan region reached 12.4 percent in January 2010, though the jobless rate had come down to 8.7 percent in February.
Some of the lost manufacturing and office jobs have been replaced by growth in warehouse centers that take advantage of the area's location near the intersection of two interstate highways, said Richard Stock, director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton.
Caterpillar Logistics, a unit of Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar Inc., and Carter Logistics LLC opened distribution centers in the area. Employees at those and other warehouses are paid "above a living wage, but they're definitely for the most part lower-middle-income jobs," Stock said.
High Skills Needed
The other major sources of growth have been in information technology, exemplified by Teradata Corp., headquartered in Dayton, and Reed Elsevier Plc's Lexis Nexis unit, which has a facility in the area, Stock said
Aeronautics and advanced materials manufacturing have also expanded around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Materiel Command and Air Force Research Laboratory, Stock said. GE Aviation, a unit of Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric Co., broke ground last year on a $51 million research center in Dayton.
"Those jobs are at the very high-skilled end, jobs that require quite a bit of education," Stock said. "There are not too many jobs in the middle."
As a result, pay has declined. Real average weekly earnings in the metropolitan area dropped to $800 last year from $817 in 2007, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by Stock.
Sitting on a metal bleacher watching her 7-year-old son at an early evening baseball practice, Mandy Copeland reflected on the expectations she and her husband had six years ago when she finished the coursework that qualified her for her occupational therapy job.