Published: October 09, 2008 11:38 am         

Ryser receives Chamber award

Two women were highlighted at the London-Laurel County Chamber of Commerce’s inaugural Women in Business celebration Monday evening at the London Community Center.

Toni Ryser received an award for starting her successful furniture business, Ryser’s, and U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao was on hand to speak about women’s roles in business, the economy and education.

Angela McCowan presented the Women in Business award to Ryser for being an entrepreneur.

Ryser was a stay-at-home mom who started working in her basement making custom draperies, McCowan said. She started traveling to furniture markets. At the age of 37, she approached a local financial institution in the late 1960s to buy farm land for $100,000 from her neighbor in East Bernstadt. She wanted to have a high-end decorating facility, but it was located between two barns. She was granted the loan. After five years, the coal boom brought customers to her store and she had the success she pursued.

Chao said she was especially supportive of women’s initiatives because she came for a family of all girls.

“This is just an exciting event. It’s the first inaugural celebration for women in business. It’s a celebration of all the contributions that women leaders have made to our community. Women are positioning themselves to really take advantage of the tremendous opportunities that are occurring in our society. Because I’m the first secretary of labor in the 21st century, I’m extremely focused on increasing the competitiveness of our nation’s work force.”

The work force of the U.S. is the most productive in the world, she said. There are about 150 million workers and about half of them are women. Increasingly women are taking larger and larger roles in lives, communities and in professions.

Before talking about education, Chao defended the “economic rescue package” that was recently passed in Washington.

“Under normal circumstances, we would not have wanted to intercede in the workings of the economy,” she said. “But, this package was really necessary as you recently saw in the unemployment numbers that was just released last Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. These numbers are indicators, as well as other indicators, of what was happening in our economy. The national unemployment rate stayed about the same at 6.1 percent, but the number of jobs lost has begun to increase. This was a warning we needed to address this issue in our economy quickly.”

The benefit package benefited main street, not Wall Street, Chao said. The credit lines were drying up. Loans were not available to students, home repairs and small businesses.

“America is still the land of opportunity, the beacon of hope, and the haven of the world,” she said. “We’re known for our freedom, our competitive advantage in such areas as global law, our tradition of transparency and our tradition of accountability under the law. Other nations admire us for what we have accomplished. We should not lose hope in ourselves.”

The work force of the 21st Century is changing rapidly and women are taking an increasingly larger role, she said. Women nowadays are getting higher education, they are getting more of an education. Most of the new jobs require higher skills and more education.

“What we do at the department of labor is to help people get the skills they need to get good-paying jobs,” Chao said.

Staff writer Carol Mills can be reached by e-mail at cmills@sentinel-echo.com.