EVENT
At the beginning of 2006, General Motors employed 10,400 workers in Flint (it’s all time high was around 80,000 in the 1970s).
At the end of 2006, that number will be 7,222.
Likewise, Delphi will fall from 2,550 to 1,050.
I wonder if the next decade will see Flint’s municipal government supass GM as the largest local employer.
Anyway, the story is here: Buyout tally brings mix of emotions.
I’d like to suggest, openly and uncritically, that Flint is ending the end of an era. Conventional logic would interpret this as the end of the “General Motors era,” but I disagree. The General Motors era ended in the late 1970s. The current era, the era of disinvestment, has been a troubled attempted transition. From what to what? Pretty much everything: one large automaker to itself, to another large automaker, to small manufacturing, to education, to commerce, to transportation hub, to tourism even. Surprisingly, most of these efforts have been modestly successful; Flint has built an infrastructure in almost all of these media far beyond what an appraisal of the city in, say, 1980 might suggest was possible. Why, then, has the place fallen apart?
Well, it’s easiest, and perhaps fairest to blame an abundance of corporate greed, an incompetant and corrupt city government, and a union that achieved the worst compromise between under- and over- agressiveness. While there are human errors all over this mess, and I could point to a dozen in any of those categories, I think that in my interactions with friends and family the desire to rationalize what has happened with some sort of justification (ie. a cause-and-effect with a villain or culprit), we miss a much more basic cause-and-effect.
The fact is that any community of 400,000, any city of 170,000 (1980. I mean 140,000; 1990. I mean 125,000; 2000) that loses 80,000 jobs cannot possibly absorb that sort of loss under the very best of circumstances. Such a shift would badly hurt cities as large as Chicago, LA, and New York. By extension, Gary, Youngstown, and East St. Louis were essentially obliterated when similar changes occurred without an extended period of transition. They, at least, benefited by closer ties to large metropolitan area.
Flint’s transition, then, has been a double-edged sword. It has allowed us to respond, granted with insufficient resources, to the crisis over an entire generation; we now have a cultural and commercial infrastructure that would frankly be the envy of Highland Park or Gary. It has allowed us to keep our own, unique identity… to keep us from being the devastated suburb. At the same time, it has encouraged false hopes. Just two years ago the Journal was filled with breathless speculation of renewed investment.
I want to be clear here; I’m making a nuanced point that isn’t about hope or the lack of hope. Whether or not there is hope, not for individuals or families, but for Flint on a large scale, a long-term scale, is perhaps beyond our control. One can be too self-empowered.
All I’m saying is, for the last thirty years, the question is “How much of GM can we keep, and for how long?” Very soon, the question will be irrelevant: they’ll be gone.
Let’s take the good with the bad, and disencumber ourselves of any illusions to which we’ve clung.
PS. Unrelated: Jess and I used to live a couple blocks from this. Great.
END OF POST.