The story of the rise of America’s black working and middle classes is inextricably bound up with that of Detroit and the Big Three. It is not a story with a simple upward trajectory. For a long time, blacks were relegated to the least desirable jobs in the plants and initially confined to a small ghetto on the East Side of the city. But slowly, haltingly, over the course of the 1950s and early ’60s, the plants became fully integrated and black workers spread across Detroit block by block, moving the city’s de facto color line as they went. “It wasn’t that long ago that Detroit was the home of the nation’s most affluent African-American population with the largest percentage of black homeowners and the highest comparative wages,” David Goldberg, an African-American Studies professor at Wayne State University, told me. [via]
![Don Skidmore, president of U.A.W. Local 735 which represents 1,100 workers at a G.M. transmission plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., that is to close. (Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times) [via]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/5D7xAfuKno91y8ih1RMwY1VNo1_400.jpg)
Don Skidmore, president of U.A.W. Local 735 which represents 1,100 workers at a G.M. transmission plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., that is to close. (Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times) [via]
The automotive industry’s current woes are so severe, members of the local ruling class say, that they feel threatened to an extent they haven’t before.
Meanwhile, what does this do to the state budget of Michigan or the city of Detroit? How much do social programs to support the newly unemployed cost compared to the bailout? Would the social fabric of those communities survive? How much would it cost the government if a city like Detroit or a state like Michigan failed?
Auto workers could be retrained, it has been suggested, but for what? What do you retrain tens of thousands of auto workers in Detroit to do during these economic times? They can’t all be nurses. Should they all move? How would that be organized and paid for? What city could absorb them? It would be a Katrina-scale disaster. Where are their FEMA trailers?
![$73 an Hour: Adding It Up [via]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/8yNvyqSyihgxvtm93qOa99Rho1_400.gif)
Few people outside of the industrial Midwest really understand the astonishing breadth and terrifying importance of the auto industry, and the central role it played historically in generating the American middle class.
![S.U.V.’s sat on the altar of Greater Grace Temple, a Pentecostal church in Detroit, as congregants prayed to save the auto industry. [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/KMF5AFEh5h9hutfuxymp0sIno1_400.jpg)
S.U.V.’s sat on the altar of Greater Grace Temple, a Pentecostal church in Detroit, as congregants prayed to save the auto industry. [via]
They are fatigued by Michigan’s years-long economic slump, and they are rattled by the international credit crisis and the apocalyptic state of the Detroit Three auto companies. They talked, often ominously, about jobs, Wall Street, money, taxes and how they sense their once mighty state is becoming something that is broken, poorer and less essential.
Fifty-five years after Charles Wilson said it, it has become clear that what’s good for General Motors is no longer good for the country. Good urban design, public transit, and increased metropolitan density, once seen as a conspiracy of liberals and do-gooders, is now the key to economic prosperity
Here’s what worries me most - like many other laid off auto workers, my dad’s in his late fifties, with a bad back, arthritis starting to set in, and a minimal college education in auto repair, no thanks to the GI Bill. He can send me email, watch the funny YouTube videos I send him, but that’s about as far as his computer skills go. With a crummy economy, how does my dad compete with all the hungry, tech-savvy college graduates that don’t have families to support?
This is not the American Dream, this is the Auto Industry Nightmare.
anthropophagous
Archive Audio Images RSS FeedThis is just a collection of things I think are neat.
A general overview of 'things I think are neat':abandonment/the post-industrial midwest, anarchism (syndicalism, insurrectionalism, etc), race/ethnicity (esp. defining/constructing the boundaries of whiteness), gender, class (talking/thinking about class generally seems to be an underrated activity), health care (access to, the experience of obtaining, etc), art, science fiction, punk music, conservative talk radio and anthropology (which probably incorporates almost everything else about people).
