WEST CARROLLTON — On the day Jim Fraley, 46, was told he would be laid off at Johnson Controls Inc. — Sept. 8, 2008 — he remembers walking to the parking lot and sitting stunned in his truck for a half hour. Twenty years, two months he’d worked at the plant in West Carrollton. He doesn’t recall the ride home. He got there somehow.

The closure of Johnson Controls, 217 S. Alex Road, a supplier to Moraine Truck & Bus which also would close, was a double punch for Fraley and wife Michelle, 43, who worked at Truck & Bus putting door seals on Blazers. The closures meant the end of a solid, middle-class household income that neared six figures.

As the automobile industry tanked and a Great Recession peaked, thousands of Dayton area workers were thrown into the void. Some immediately opted for retraining, others took any job they could find to stay afloat, while many simply moved on to other states. There are those who are still looking.

The Fraleys have both since found jobs, but their household income has been cut in half. It’s a familiar problem — even for those who retrained for other jobs.

The harsh reality is that many caught in the recession have had to look at other fields, but they find that even skilled labor doesn’t meet wage expectations because of market saturation and the sheer loss of full-time positions, said Ann Stevens, spokeswoman for Montgomery County Job and Family Services.

“The struggle is you have to consider something that doesn’t pay the same rate that you made before,” she said. “That is what we are seeing.”

The Recession also flooded the market with job-seekers at a time when jobs were hard to come by. Officially, Johnson Controls shut down the plant n December 2008 as General Motors Corp. closed the Truck & Bus assembly line. Johnson Controls employed 330, while Truck & Bus employed 1,100 at the time of closure, and up to 4,000 when the plant was at its peak. The seats it made went into SUVs including the Chevrolet TrailBlazer and GMC Envoy.

The Fraleys toughed out some anxious months and surrendered their Clayton home with its 13 years of mortgage payments to the bank. Vacations are out of the question and other non-necessities went too. They live now in a rental house in West Milton. It’s affordable.

“It was a real eye-opener,” Fraley said of the past couple of years. “It was a shock.”

Fraley began work as an assembler in 1988. At the time, the Moraine plant was making S-10 pickups. He began at $5.46 an hour but his pay quickly increased to $11 an hour as his productivity increased. He rose through the ranks, becoming a forklift driver, then a team leader, and finally a supply chain analyst, his job when the plant closed.

With government assistance money set aside for workers displaced by foreign imports, Fraley enrolled in heating and air conditioning classes at Miami Valley CTC. Nine months later, he graduated at top of his class. But with the job market awash with other retained workers, salaries started at only $10 per hour.

“That was another shocker. The market was flooded,” Fraley said. “It never really panned out. I couldn’t take a $10 an hour job with the bill situation and to meet all the obligations I had.”

Meanwhile, his wife went back to school to be retrained as a medical coder.

Fraley, through a friend, scored a delivery job at a Krispy Kreme Donut shop in Monroe, making $100 a day. The only problem: his vehicle got only about eight miles per gallon.

After a series of setbacks, that including a brief hospitalization when he slipped off a snow-covered porch and broke his tailbone, Fraley got a steady job with a delivery service. His wife is working for a billing company in Miamisburg.

Like others in their situation, the Fraleys are angry.

“First and foremost, I think NAFTA hurt us,” said Jim.

For Michelle, the experience has shaken her faith in political leadership.

“I just want to be able to live,” she said. “We need jobs in America —government needs to look out for the people. They need to quit fattening their paychecks and look out for everyone else.”