City officials and community members in a rural town in far southeastern Minnesota are trying everything they can to preserve dozens of jobs after an employer abruptly announces it’s outsourcing the jobs to China.
Miken Sports has produced bats for youth sports as well as helmets used in Major League baseball in Caledonia, Minn., for a couple decades. It employed before the pandemic at least 100 and currently about 80 people in the city of 2,800 and was a community fixture.
“They do a lot for the schools for all the sports and anything that’s going on they’ve been very generous with donations for many fundraisers and stuff like that. They’ve been a big part of the town,” Mayor DeWayne Schroeder said.
Schroeder said city officials found out through word of mouth rumors, not from the company itself. Leaders are upset that a dependable workforce will be out of work.
“All these employees that work at Miken, they’re really proud of the work that they do, the quality that they do,” Eric Johnson, Houston County board member, said. “And that’s real important. It’s really devastating and frustrating and they're angry at what happened here.”
City administrator Adam Swann said their concerns extend beyond employment.
“They helped contribute to property taxes because they’re currently leasing a pretty large parcel in our industrial complex, so if it’s vacant, those property values are going to go down and we’re going to be losing tax money. And if workers have to relocate out of the city, there could be a glut of housing and housing prices could be depressed, so it’s just going to have ripple effects. Obviously the high school and the schools will be affected because students won’t be in the district,” he said.
State Sen. Jeremy Miller and Repr. Greg Davids said their conversations with company officials were grim, saying they were too far in the process to reverse a decision to save jobs.
“We were more than willing to have that conversation and as we had that conversation we were basically cut off,” Davids said. “I think the quote was, ‘It would take a miracle.’ I believe in miracles but we just got cut off before we could dig into the details of what we could do.”
Now their last-ditch effort is leaning on the congressional delegation to possibly stop the jobs going to China, or at least relocate the workers in the county so they don’t leave. Sen.Tina Smith said a financial incentive package to entice Miken to stay is unnecessary because the strong community and workforce should be enough.
“They ask for taxpayer support. They ask for billions of dollars in subsidies for their baseball stadiums. They ask for exemptions from antitrust law. And then they turn around and reward that partnership by removing 80 jobs from Caledonia to China,” she said. “I think the only thing that we can do is to call it out and call attention to it.”
Smith said she has not received a response from her letter to Major League Baseball, which owns Miken along with Rawlings and a private equity firm.
