Closure Of The Sacramento Campbell Soup Plant Will Be Very Painful

This plant is only three miles from my house. Closure of the plant will rip open a new hole in the economy of South Sacramento, and the reverberations will be felt for miles in all directions, as customers disappear from shops, crime increases, and dependency grows. And what happens to the adjacent power plants (SPAC & Carson Ice-Gen)? Will they close too?:

It's an economic oasis in one of Sacramento's most impoverished neighborhoods – and an enduring symbol of the region's Big Tomato roots.

No wonder the shutdown of Campbell Soup Co.'s 65-year-old factory in south Sacramento, announced early Thursday, quickly became a bombshell felt up and down Franklin Boulevard and as far away as the Governor's Office.

The closure, to be completed in stages between now and next July, will eliminate 700 solidly blue-collar jobs, some paying $20 an hour or more. It won't stop Sacramento's late-arriving economic recovery, experts said, but it will hurt the job market and take another piece out of the region's middle class.

"Good jobs for poor people," said Monsignor James Church, pastor at nearby St. Rose Catholic Church. "This is going to whack our area – we're poor enough as it is."

Plant worker Dave Martin said the company had been dropping hints for months that the factory was in trouble, with managers complaining in staff meetings about slumping soup sales and bloated production costs. Campbell's has been losing market share as consumers drift away from canned soup.

Managers told workers that the Sacramento plant, whose workforce is represented by the Teamsters, pays the highest wages of any Campbell's factory, according to Martin. He added that some of the plant's chicken-noodle soup production was moved to another facility a month ago.

"Finally, today, they made the announcement they were closing it down," said Jesse Shanker, who has worked at the plant 22 years. "They told us that soup sales are going really, really slow, and it has been sliding over the years. And right now, they can't afford to run this plant."