Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of Manufacturing will tell the story of the reinvention of manufacturing in Michigan. The dynamo that powered the state's economy for five decades is back in a big way. However, this rebirth did not occur easily and it is not finished.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of Manufacturing will tell the stories of the people behind the reinvention of this economic powerhouse. We will meet the people who are teaching new skills, the people learning new skills, the people who are reinventing manufacturing in Michigan.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of Manufacturing will also warn of the dangers inherent in any reinvention. Often there are unintended consequences. Sometimes it just doesn't work. There will be failures along the way. We will also look at those.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of Manufacturing. Lets begin with a taste of Chapter One:
The middle class was crushed by the collapse of
manufacturing in Michigan. The home of the Detroit Three –General Motors, Ford
and Chrysler—was not alone. A Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings study
released in June 2011 showed that “between 2000 and 2010, the United States
lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs, amounting to nearly one-third of
its manufacturing employment.” That is 5 million people who formed the backbone
of the Middle Class in the U.S. who, at least for a short time, didn’t know
where their next paycheck would be coming from.
The auto industry’s collapse in Detroit did more than just ripple
out to the other communities of Michigan. It hit with the force of a tsunami.
The Michigan auto industry is an interconnected network of three tiers of suppliers ranging from companies with thousands of employees
to the Mom and Pop, brother and sister tool and die shops run and staffed by
families who were expecting that the
generations to follow would stay on that path.
The collapse of auto manufacturing in Detroit brought them
all down.
The assembly lines that produced the vehicles America and
the world depended on in the first decades of the 21st century were not the only
production venues slowed and the people who staffed those lines were not the
only Michigan residents thrown out of work. The cooks and waitresses at the
restaurants where those assembly line workers took their meals lost their jobs
too. So did grocery clerks and cashiers. Property values crashed. State tax revenue fell.
Teachers, police officers, firefighters and many of the government workers who
we depend on --but at the same time take for granted-- were next in the
unemployment line.
The same Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings June 2011
study that documented the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs also showed that the
“Grand Rapids, Mich. region outperformed the national economy on job creation
in eight of 10 major industry groups” from 1980-2005. However the end was near.
From 2000-2005, the Grand Rapids region lost 18.5 percent of its manufacturing
jobs.
We never imagined it could get this bad.
Stay with me. More installments of
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of Manufacturing will be coming as a preview of the ebook that will be released in June 2012.
Rod
