Published: May 17, 2008 10:06 pm            

MARK BENNETT: Gone today, here tomorrow: In business, there is no forever

TERRE HAUTE — Our dog has never read John Maynard Keynes.

She’ll carry off a piece of meat from her bowl, climb into the clothes hamper and hide the food there. By laundry day, I’ll find the meat, now fossilized.

To her credit, the dog plans ahead. Unfortunately for her, she also gets too busy chewing up other things and forgets about her hidden stash. If only she’d studied Keynes, the British economist, who wrote, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Last week, people around Terre Haute got a realistic view of the long run.

On Tuesday, Pfizer Inc. announced it would close its Vigo County plant in 2009. Just a couple years ago, the pharmaceutical giant committed $300 million and most of its local operation toward producing a heralded, new inhaled insulin drug, Exubera. Diabetics didn’t like it, though, and sales fizzled. So Pfizer scrapped it last year, and cut 660 high-paying jobs here. Even then, the community hoped Pfizer would find other products to be made at the plant for the remaining 140 employees.

After all, the facility south of the city has been operating for 60 years. And in 2003, when Pfizer closed the 700-acre animal research division that had been an anchor of its Vigo County plant for 51 years, a company spokesman said, “Pfizer remains committed to Terre Haute.” Forty jobs were lost, but production refocused on antibiotics.

But Tuesday’s announcement made it clear Pfizer’s plans have changed, for the long run. “We don’t have any other products to put here,” a spokesman said. By next summer, the place will be closed.

That significant loss had just started to sink in, when a very different company — California customer service firm Alorica — announced Thursday morning it would open a call center in a vacant retail building at Plaza North. Within days, the firm will begin interviewing and then hiring a work force that should reach nearly 600 employees by the end of this year.

The timing of the Pfizer shutdown and the Alorica startup weighed on the minds of civic and business leaders gathered for the Alorica announcement Thursday morning at Plaza North.

“The news comes at a good time for us folks, us Hoosiers. We need help,” said Travis Vickers, a 38-year-old Terre Hautean who will be the site manager for the local Alorica operation.

In a perfect world, Pfizer would be quickly replaced by another drug maker who would take over the plant, and rehire the full crew and their work would continue seamlessly. In reality, things often change in disconnected ways.

Alorica offers good news, in its own right, to Terre Haute and especially the city’s north side. More than 90 percent of the center’s employees will be full-timers, with benefits such as health care, retirement planning, 401(k)s, tuition reimbursements and paid leave, said Jeffrey Sopko, Alorica’s vice president of human relations. More than 80 percent of promotions go to internal candidates, he added. Wages for customer service agents, who must have a high school diploma or a GED, will start out at $9 per hour, while other salaries “top out in the mid- to higher-five-figures for upper management,” Sopko said.

Layoffs and closings at Pfizer, International Paper and Great Dane have affected nearly 1,100 workers in the Terre Haute area since 2007. Alorica will draw from a labor force Sopko called “very, very robust.”

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels praised Alorica’s choice to locate in Terre Haute, and repeated his comparison of the state’s economy to a faucet filling a bathtub with the plug pulled. Daniels envisioned two businesses arriving every time one leaves.

Pfizer is a tremendously draining loss, essentially irreplaceable. Those biotech, advanced manufacturing jobs lasted lifetimes in many cases, and paid $18 to $35 a hour and more. Supervisory jobs could reach six figures. The 2007 payroll for 787 workers was $49.2 million, according to Vigo County tax records.

Besides the economic infusion of their incomes, the Pfizer employees were strong contributors to the United Way, and active supporters of youth sports, churches and schools programs. With the Exubera-driven layoffs last year, some of those displaced Pfizer folks have already moved elsewhere. Others like this community so well, they’ve stayed.

This region needs as many jobs as possible for those 1,100 people who’ve experienced layoffs, as well as the latest high school graduates, and products of the colleges here. For a portion of jobseekers, Alorica offers an option.

“There’s always other opportunities,” said Vickers, a Terre Haute South Vigo High School graduate, a former Consolidated Communications employee, and the first person Alorica hired locally. “If one door closes, maybe another one opens. So for those folks who have an open mind and are willing and want to maybe try something in a different field — it may not be comfortable because they may not know it — but they would have a skills set that’s so strong, they would be fine.”

Sopko said Terre Haute’s talent pool was one of the attractions for Alorica, which received no local or state incentives to locate here. The company formed in 1999. It has 11 centers in the U.S. and two in the Philippines.

“The key thing with [labor-force] quality and availability, is it going to be there in three, five, seven or 10 years?” Sopko said. “Our methodology has always been, once we go into a new community and make the commitment to the community, to be there in perpetuity.”

A new long run has begun.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

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