Jobs From Artillery Manufacture For Ukraine Have Revived Scranton, PA's Economy

Ukraine's war against Russian invasion has forced the US and NATO to now see that they have to increase production of weapons to survive an attack by Russian and/or China. 

The provision of weapons for Ukraine has helped keep it in the fight while preventing deployment of US and NATO soldiers. But it has had a secondary economic benefit, because most of the funds allocated for such production remain in the US where they are actually contributing to the revival of economies in once moribund rust-belt cities like Scranton, PA that are now attracting new jobs and people. JL 

Jacob Bogage reports in the Washington Post:

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the federal government has allocated $175 billion in assistance for the conflict. But much of that money remains in the United States: It powers plants like the Army’s factory in Scranton, which makes 155-millimeter artillery rounds, others in Alabama, which make armored personnel carriers, and Texas, where mobile artillery rocket systems are built. Artillery production has more than doubled. Aid for Ukraine matters to the local economies that manufacture the materiel. Job openings are drawing people to Scranton for jobs that have replaced those in the long-gone coal mines and factories

Before the artillery shells reach Ukrainian troops on the front lines of their war with Russia, they’re an economic boon in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the federal government has allocated nearly $175 billion in emergency assistance for the conflict. But much of that money remains in the United States: It powers plants like the Army’s factory in Scranton, which makes 155-millimeter artillery rounds, and others in Alabama, which make armored personnel carriers, and Texas, where mobile artillery rocket systems are built.

 

General Dynamics, the contractor that runs the 116-year-old Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, has added more than 200 jobs in this region since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Artillery production more than doubled, and the General Dynamics facilities in the region produce more than a third of the 155mm rounds the United States aims to send to the front lines each month.

Gentex, a military contractor in nearby Carbondale, Pa., increased staffing by 10 percent over the past year, officials say. German glass firm Schott, which makes high-tech optical products for civilian and military uses in Duryea, Pa., boosted employment by dozens of jobs over the past five years.

Those jobs are helping to reverse the area’s economic slide. For decades after coal mines and textile mills closed down, the unemployment rate here was at least two percentage points higher than the national average, said Satyajit Ghosh, a professor at the University of Scranton who studies the regional economy. Now it’s often better than the national metrics, as the region has diversified into health care, education and logistics — and begins what locals hope will be a manufacturing resurgence.

“This is not a fluke,” Ghosh said. “If you use unemployment rate as the marker, this would be the best I have seen, or that anyone has seen.”

Rounds made in Scranton go next to Iowa, where they are fitted with explosives and fuses, before they’re ready for Ukraine or NATO allies.

Conservative opposition is mounting in Washington to additional Ukraine aid, and GOP rebels in the House nearly spiked the last emergency package lawmakers approved in April.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) demanded that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fire the country’s ambassador to Washington after he visited the Scranton plant last week to thank production line workers.

Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has said Ukraine should consider surrendering territory to Russia to end the war.

But Biden and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have countered that spending for Ukraine’s defense is in both the security and economic interests of the United States.

 

Rep. Matt Cartwright (D), one of Washington’s strongest Ukraine supporters, who is locked in a tight reelection race to represent Scranton and surrounding counties, said he expects Ukraine may need more funding soon, during Congress’s lame-duck session after November’s elections.

Northeastern Pennsylvania hopes to prove the premise that aid for Ukraine matters just as much to the local economies that manufacture the materiel, said Scranton Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a Democrat elected in 2019. Job openings are drawing people to Scranton. With a population of around 77,000, it anchors a growing region of more than 500,000 people. The city is desperate for nurses, said Bob Durkin, president of the local Chamber of Commerce. With the rapid expansion of the universities and hospitals, electrical workers are in demand to wire the buildings. Plenty of retail jobs need filling, Ghosh said.

What northeastern Pennsylvania lacks, officials say, are highly skilled professional workers who can teach at the universities or the new medical college, engineer new glass products or write the software that integrates military helmets and armored vehicles.

Part of the solution is attracting workers from big cities, officials say. Michael Turek, Gentex’s chief operating officer, commutes to Carbondale a few days a week from a Philadelphia suburb.

But officials hope even more that the opportunities can persuade young professionals and new college graduates to stay in Scranton or come back to the region, Lackawanna County Commissioner Matt McGloin said.

 

Housing is far cheaper than in the big cities nearby. A food scene is slowly emerging. Scranton is in line to get an Amtrak station that will connect it to New York.

Signs of the city’s turnaround are mixed, though. Are the unoccupied retail spaces in the heart of Scranton — on the newly named Biden Street — signs of healthy churn or the prohibitive cost of running a business? Some of the jobs that have replaced those in the long-gone coal mines and factories don’t truly provide a living wage, locals says.

The region has tiers of work: The abundant and cheap retail gigs, the proliferating warehousing jobs, the careers on factory floors — then a gap. Workers who want more can get stuck attempting the leap from production lines to Gentex’s design lab or Schott’s brightly lit front office.

Fixing that is part of Scranton’s new aim, Cognetti said. Investment in the area will yield more competition for workers, a narrower skills gap and more opportunities.

“There is nothing stopping somebody who is from a long line of generational miners and now manufacturing workers — there’s nothing stopping them from getting a job in any other industry,” Cognetti said.

Defense manufacturing has been a major part of the Scranton area’s economy for generations. The ammunition plant began as a train-building and maintenance facility in 1908 and was one of the largest employers in Scranton — then a much larger city of more than 100,000 people. The Army converted it into a plant in 1953.

Gentex began as a silk producer in New York in the 1890s, then moved to Carbondale after a fire and began making military parachutes, then helmets during the world wars. Some of its first employees were the wives of coal miners. Inside each facility, local leaders say, is a glimpse of what northeastern Pennsylvania was, and what it could be.

Visitors enter the ammunition plant to a stark warning: Everything you touch will either severely burn you or cut you — or, at the very least, ruin your clothes. The factory is dark. Its floors are sticky. It smells like tar and sweat and chemical cleaning products. In the summer, the only relief from the heat of the metal furnaces is a series of tunnels that double as break rooms. In the winter, machine operators can report to their stations in short sleeves.

The Army has invested nearly $420 million to modernize the place. It captures thousands of gallons of rainwater to cool the machines. On a recent visit, technicians were replacing decades-old production lines with faster, quieter, energy-efficient machines.

At Gentex, workers manufacture helmets on the same wooden floors where silk-spinning machines once stood. One level above them, a sprawling atrium displays nearly a dozen generations of the firm’s helmets — for tank gunners, ground forces, and Navy and Air Force pilots. A highlight reel that could have been spliced from an action movie shows GIs soaring on fighter jets, then breaching doorways and clearing buildings. “When you look at a site like this, what people don’t always realize is, they think, manufacturing. We think high-tech,” said Christopher Cassidy, president of Schott’s North American operations.

For Biden, who lived in Scranton until he was 10 years old, defense manufacturing is both a boon for Ukraine and a balm for long-ago economic decay.

“Think what happens when that factory closes in Scranton or anywhere around the country, when the school is underfunded, when inequity grows larger and larger. It puts the middle class further out of reach and rips the dignity and pride and hope out of communities all across the country, including right here in Pennsylvania,” the president said during a speech in the area in April.

But that view, some locals say, is based on a Scranton that hasn’t existed in decades. Industries have changed: The region now prides itself first on its “eds and meds” rather than its goods-producing heritage. The people have changed: The city is far more diverse than it was two generations ago. Scranton’s Hispanic population has increased dramatically, from just over 1,000 in 1970 to 12,000 — more than 15 percent of the population — in 2020, according to Census Bureau data.

Many of those changes are positive, local officials say. Quality of living is better. For years, small fires burned below ground in old coal mines. Durkin, from the Chamber of Commerce, grew up playing in his neighborhood at the foot of a slag heap, a mountain of discarded stones and soil from dug-out mines. Those dangers are gone now. The jobs are mostly safer.

Still, decades of deindustrialization here and throughout what Cognetti, the mayor, calls “legacy cities” — she despises the term “Rust Belt” — have an enduring legacy. Is more manufacturing, a throwback to Scranton’s past, an effective salve?

“To the extent that we can still have things made in America, made in northeastern Pennsylvania, made in Scranton, people want that. People want those jobs. They want that ability to make something with their hands,” she said. “There’s a sense that it’s a career opportunity. It’s an economic opportunity. It’s also a source of pride for us here.”