The Department of Employment Security recently announced some good news for 187 soon to be laid off workers at the Molex Corporation in Guilford.
They qualify for a federal assistance program that will help train them and help them search for new jobs.
The reason they qualify, and here's the bad news, is that their jobs left the country.
They are among the thousands of New Hampshire workers who have seen their jobs disappear just over the last several years.
But as NHPR's Mark Bevis reports, what was once a cause of concern has become a fact of life.
The notice about the job loss at Molex was one that the State's Department of Employment Security sends out every now and then.
In the past 6 months, similar announcements went out about Teredyne, Celestica, and the Burnes Group.
Some are better known that others.
In total, so far this year, more than 14 hundred workers in New Hampshire have qualified for a federal program called Trade Adjustment Assistance.
The program helps provide new skills for those laid off and also helps in the job search.
Worker may have qualified because, like Molex and Teredyne, their company is moving operations abroad.
Or, they may qualify because their company is reorganizing so it can better compete in this era of global free trade.
Sandy Smith Dupree, at the Department of Labor Security, says there are some exceptions, but most of the job losses in this state are in one industry.
tape: usually it in the electronic manufacturing area, but you know even as far back as 2000, an example is the Annalee Dolls, they were effected in Meredith and they manufacture dolls, so it's not always electronic, but it's a big player.
Across the board, from electronics to adhesives, from knitting to packaging, more than 41 hundred workers have qualified for Trade Adjustment Assistance since 2002.
But according Ross Gittel a Professor of Management at University of New Hampshire, these losses have not seriously hurt the state's economy.
tape: they're finding other jobs in NH and nearby NH. They're not leaving the state because we don't have large declines in population in the recent census data. What we have is that people are reemployed in similar types of positions in different types of industries.
New Hampshire still has an unemployment rate of only about 3.6%.
That's less than the national average and one of the best in the region.
And Gittel says there's no indication that those laid off have become discouraged and stopped looking for work.
But there is one concern: wages.
tape: we're not seeing the type of increase in real wages as one would expect and hope for during a period of economic recovery.
What's happening is that businesses in the state are forced to respond to what's become an economic reality.
Brett St. Clair is with the Business and Industry Association says as worrisome as it is, this kind of economic evolution is not new.
tape: For example all the mills in Manchester that manufactured textiles, that work went to other parts of the world?they closed and then it was shoes and then shoes went out and then it was electronics and that's where we are now.
St. Clair calls this new trend part of the creative renewal of the economy.
And he says local companies are developing strategies for competing.
tape: what you're finding is a lot of the research and development, prototyping, kind of the higher value added, thinking type manufacturing is still being done here, and when things become sort of routine, a commodity, they are being outsourced to factories in lower cost parts of the world.
St Clair admits his optimism does nothing for the man or woman who faces the pain of losing a job.
But he points to the mills in Manchester.
They were once filled with thousands of workers.
Those buildings were quiet for decades?
And now they're filling up again.
For NHPR News, this is Mark Bevis.
