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