Detroit Jobs Might Return, But Workers Still Lack Skills. DETROIT, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr has a long list of things to fix in the city and among them is one that may sound surprising: there are not enough skilled workers to fill job openings as they become available. “Every problem in this city revolves around jobs,” said Lindsay Chalmers, vice president of non-profit Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit. “That’s at the heart of the issue for Detroit.” The decline of manufacturing jobs, above all in the automotive industry, has played a major role in the slide of the Motor City’s population to 700,000 from a peak of 1.8 million in the 1950s. Despite recent gains, Michigan has 350,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2000. Seismic shifts in the local labor market have left many unskilled workers behind. “In the old days you could graduate on Friday, get hired at the Ford plant on Monday and they’d train you,” said Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
We saved the automakers. How come that didn’t save Detroit? It's common for headline-writers to refer to the Big Three automakers — Ford, Chrysler, and GM — as "Detroit. " The monument to Joe Louis in Detroit, known as "The Fist. " (Paul Sancya/AP) But that metonymy is misleading in a very important way. The fortunes of Detroit the city are no longer tied up with the fortunes of the Big Three automakers. That helps explain why Ford, Chrysler, and GM have all been thriving since the auto bailout in 2009 while the city of Detroit continued to deteriorate and has now just declared bankruptcy.
From 1910 to 1950, Detroit's economy was synonymous with car manufacturing. Even then, much of the auto industry's industrial base wasn't in the city proper. But starting in 1950, automakers began moving more and more of their operations further away. Detroit's auto jobs kept vanishing as the Big Three lost market share to foreign automakers starting in the 1970s. Today, there are only two auto factories left in Detroit. But that's it. Wonkbook newsletter. Shinola has perfect timing in Detroit. By Kai Ryssdal January 21, 2016 | 3:48 PM There's a new term out there to describe a recent manufacturing movement in America - "Make-tailers. " It's a category of "embedded-in-the-community" companies that produce small-batch, high-quality artisan products.
One of the marquee examples of this movement is Shinola. Kartsosis is from Plano, Texas, but he chose Detroit for his new company's headquarters and production facility. Shinola has been divisive amongst Detroiters. But Shinola's growth signals corporate success. Marketplace visited Shinola's headquarters in Detroit where the company also has its leather shop. Produced by Tommy Andres. You Don't know Sh** about Detroit's Shinola. Luxury goods maker Shinola is marketing upscale watches and bicycles by playing up the brand’s blue-collar roots Perhaps no American city has a better story to tell right now than Detroit. Beginning well before the beleaguered city’s bankruptcy filing in 2013, tons of ink has been spilled about Detroit’s declining population, high unemployment, poverty and high crime rate. There have been photo essays both on its abandoned buildings and on its resilient and resourceful residents. (Marketing News joined the fray in July 2013, running a story on urban planners’ and the business community’s efforts to reimagine the city as a hub for new businesses and tech startups.)
The ongoing tale of this once-mighty city’s comeback attempts makes for compelling content and—as a handful of auto brands and at least one luxury goods maker have found—positions it well to serve as prime marketing fodder. Built in Detroit Even the brand’s name has more spunk than a typical luxury-oriented enterprise. A video. Motor City: The Story of Detroit. Who is to blame for Detroit’s bankruptcy—China? Or robots? When Erica was a young child, she had a hard time coping with the absence of her father. Even as a five-year-old, she would violently act out.
Her mother shielded Erica from the knowledge that her dad was in prison, a convicted serial rapist. Eventually, counselors at a specialized after-school program revealed to Erica that her father was behind bars. They did not talk about his crimes, but they helped her make supervised contact. More than 5 million children in the United States have had a parent in prison or jail, according to a 2015 study from the Maryland-based research center Child Trends.
Researchers and specialists have understood for some time that a parent’s incarceration can have a severe impact on a child. The trauma of having a parent behind bars “I almost spit on my teacher today,” says Nina, 9, whose father is serving 15 years in prison on drug charges. “We honor that this is their parent, and this is a relationship that is really valuable to them,” says Mullane. The Struggles of Detroit Ensnare Its Workers. Fast Food Strike Wave Spreads to Detroit. Credit: Detroit15.org. Four updates appear below. Hundreds of Detroit fast food workers plan to walk off the job beginning at 6 am today, making the motor city the fourth in five weeks to see such strikes. Organizers expect participants from at least sixty stores, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Subway, Little Caesar’s, and Popeye’s locations. Like this week’s strike in St. Louis, and last month’s in New York and Chicago, today’s work stoppage is backed by a local coalition including the Service Employees International Union, and the participants are demanding a raise to $15 an hour and the chance to form a union without intimidation.
Organizers say that over a hundred workers joined the St. A spokesperson for Jimmy John’s declined to comment on Thursday’s strike. As I’ve written elsewhere, the fate of the fast food strike wave carries far-reaching implications: Fast food jobs are a growing portion of our economy, and fast food–like conditions are proliferating in other sectors as well. Forbes Welcome.
Why Detroit's Collapse Was So Much Worse Than Other Hard-Hit Cities. The best CityRead of this month may be the New Yorker profile of L. Brooks Patterson, kingpin of suburban Detroit (paywall). Patterson wears a number of hats — chief executive of Oakland County, sprawl lover, political loud mouth, unabashed Detroit basher — and is a controversial personality, to put it kindly. He has faced allegations of racism in the past, and reading Williams's profile it's not hard to see why: When I asked him how Detroit might fix its financial problems, he said, "I made a prediction a long time ago, and it's come to pass. I said, 'What we're gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.'" Whatever you think of Patterson as a person, he's been a successful executive for Oakland County by fiscal standards.
Many, many factors played a role in the rise and fall of Detroit, but the collapse of the city's manufacturing sector is among the most important. Bridge • The Center for MichiganDetroit struggling to create jobs outside of downtown. A stretch of Livernois Avenue, tabbed as the “Avenue of Fashion,” is a “critical commercial corridor” where city leaders now say job growth can once again take place. Detroit has a host of well-documented problems – poverty, crime, street lights, mass transit – that hamper its recovery. But the ability to create jobs may be its biggest hurdle. More jobs could mean less poverty and more tax revenues to fix the many broken things. “It’s absolutely critical that Detroit grow jobs,” said Teresa Lynch, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a principal at Mass Economics, which is helping the Detroit Future City’s group work on economic development strategies.
A large part of the problem is where jobs are located in the city. A Bridge look at jobs within Detroit’s sprawling boundaries shows that perhaps no other large city in the country finds most of its jobs confined to such a tiny sliver of its land, with much of the rest a veritable jobs desert. The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets. With the stock market hitting record highs day after day, it is easy to move on and forget that one of American's once premier cities, Detroit, has been bankrupt for nearly a year. But out of mind doesn't mean out of sight, especially now that Google has launched its street view Time Machine, which provides for 7 years worth of street images, showing the time shift of the tumultuous period period starting in 2007. One blogger who decided to take this time lapse data and apply it to the city of Detroit is GooBing Detroit who, as the following time-lapse photos demonstrate, has captured Detoit's unprecedented slow-motion collapse into death and decay in what is the closest we have to "real time.
" Perhaps what is most stunning about the following series of photos is not the ultimate fate of the bankrupt city, but how quickly a once vibrant metropolis has succumbed to blight and sheer desperation. Hopefully not coming to a street near you. July 2013 September 2013 Brightmoor neighborhood. Detroit Is an Example of Everything That Is Wrong with Our Nation. Back on July 18, 2013 the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Detroit is now seeing a little life, but the city is far from where it once was. Once the wealthiest city in America, known as the “arsenal of democracy,” Detroit was the fourth largest city in the U.S. in the 1960s with a population of two million. Now it has become an example of everything that is wrong with the American economy, Detroit has become nothing more than a devastated landscape of urban decay with a current population of 714,000 whose unemployment rate at the height of the recession was as high as 29 percent, and has only decreased due to the rapidly decreasing population.
Visiting Detroit is the closest Americans can come to viewing what appears to be a war-torn city without leaving the U.S. Unfortunately, Detroit is not alone. Now the city is debt-ridden and forced to cut many of its beleaguered services like transportation and street lighting. As Detroit founders, its auto industry soars; rapid globalization leaves city's economy behind. The name “Detroit” is still synonymous with auto manufacturing in the U.S., but the strong revival in the auto industry in the past four years, after decades of globalization, has done little to lift the beleaguered city’s economy or reputation.
All three major U.S. automakers still have headquarters in the Detroit metropolitan area, where the world’s auto industry was born. But the Big Three long ago moved some of the biggest chunks of their production, jobs and plants to places as near as Ohio and Ontario and as far away as China, Brazil and Russia. Without the plentiful factory jobs and incomes that once made Detroit a wealthy and teeming metropolis, the city steadily deteriorated into a hollow shell of vacant buildings and weed-covered lots. Last month, it became the largest American city ever to declare bankruptcy. PHOTOS: Graphics about Detroit's auto industry The car industry’s rebound hasn’t reversed the trend.
Rebound Story Continues → City by City, Measuring the Recovery. Forbes Welcome. The numbers behind Detroit's jobs crisis. Detroit has made great progress toward addressing the needs of its residents in the last few years. However, one of the city’s most important challenges remains: rebuilding the city’s workforce. The crux of this challenge is that there are too few jobs in the city for its residents and too many barriers to employment. Improving economic conditions have led to a net gain of over 7,900 residents employed since January 2014. But many Detroiters continue to struggle to access meaningful employment that allows them to support their families and their communities.
What will it take to help Detroiters overcome these barriers? What actions can government and private enterprise take to equip workers in Detroit with the tools they need to find and keep jobs? Where should scarce resources be spent to improve the workforce development system and match jobs to those seeking them? First, the report confirms that there are more job seekers in the city than available jobs.