Filed under: no one is immune

Under any other circumstances, this might be a LOL story. Considering the implications of an entire group of people normally insulated from the booms and busts, I'd say there's nothing to LOL about here.

USA Today:

Freeman Wingard is Amish, but he spent the last decade living quite differently than the popular characterization of the Amish as farmers, their plows hitched to enormous draft horses as they eschewed influences of the outside world.

Wingard took his family to restaurants every week, made trips to Chicago and vacationed in Florida. That was when, he says, he was earning $40 per hour working in a Northern Indiana recreational vehicle factory.

But as RV sales slowed in the economic downturn, Wingard and many of his Amish co-workers were laid off from the high-paying jobs.

Wingard, who has a wife and five daughters younger than 13, added jellies and jams to the quilts and other crafts he and his family sell from their farm. Despite the long hours — Wingard often rises at 3:30 a.m. and puts up 300 jars of jelly by noon — none of the new enterprises has come close to replacing the factory incomes.

Still, Wingard says, there is an upside. "The work is still hard, but it's flexible, and I can be with my kids."

The economy has taken some toll on most of the USA's 400 Amish settlements, experts say, but none has seen such a widespread impact as the country's third-largest Amish settlement in Northern Indiana.

"Nowhere in U.S. Amish history has a down economy affected the Amish so much," said Steven Nolt, a professor at Goshen College who has written about the Northern Indiana Amish. "It's a pivotal time for them."