Blue Collar, Chapter Two By Rod Kackley

Blue Collar

Chapter Two: The Great Collapse

Detroit is bankrupt and Kwame Kilpatrick, the most recent former mayor of the Motor City is going to a federal prison after being convicted on corruption charges. 

That was the punchline to one of the worst jokes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

If there remains any doubt as to the level of despair and decay in what was the wheelhouse of Michigan’s economy, all you have to do is view the photography of Andrew Moore’s book and exhibition, Detroit Disassembled.

These pictures are worth a thousand tears. To be faced with the collapse of the city that was the poster municipality for the industrialized twentieth century is like seeing the NFL hero of one’s youth hobbled by age after taking too many hits to the head and too many punches to the spleen.

 It was very much like watching my mother, turned into someone I barely recognized by Alzheimer’s disease, on the last day of her life. My father and I held each other wondering aloud if it would be more humane to rest a soft pillow over her face. We didn’t. Before long we didn’t have too.

Detroit was so broken it couldn’t even afford the cost of the soft pillow. There was no money to tear down the buildings that were being consumed by Mother Nature and her animals that had returned to the abandoned city.

It is not just the Motor City that was knocked flat by the clothesline of the Great Recession and the decimation of twentieth-century industrialization. The home of the Detroit Three—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—was not alone.

The middle class—created by the rise of manufacturing—was crushed by the collapse of manufacturing in Michigan. 

A Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings study released in June 2011 showed “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 five-million families, living in five-million homes, the backbone of the middle class in the U.S. who, at least for a short time, didn’t know where their next paychecks would be coming from.

Millions of them still don’t have paychecks. They have lost more than money. They have lost their future. They have lost their hope. They are crushed.

Just as Detroit was not, and is not, alone, neither was or is auto manufacturing, the industry that our characters in Blue Collar depended on for their paychecks. The paper plants that built and powered Kalamazoo suffered the same fate. I touched on that in this excerpt from Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community.

  “The paper industry was to Kalamazoo what the auto industry was to Detroit and the furniture industry was to Grand Rapids. They built the cultures of their communities. Everyone knew the drill: Get out of high school with or without a diploma, get a job in the mills, or the factories, and you had a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle.

It all came crashing down. However, Western Michigan University survived. Kalamazoo’s place in the West Michigan higher education community was destined to grow.

But the other three legs of the stool broke one after another.  Kalamazoo didn’t only lose Big Paper; Kalamazoo also lost its place in the auto supply chain. And Kalamazoo lost Big Pharma. Upjohn, which was taken over by Pharmacia, which was taken over by Pfizer, closed facility after facility in Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor and Holland. 

Kalamazoo made the same mistake as Detroit and Grand Rapids; they took it all for granted, until it was all gone. Consider that one of the critical takeaways from this page. No matter how good things are going today, we have to keep working on tomorrow’s cluster of prosperity.

You can still see the collateral damage in Kalamazoo, just like in Detroit and Grand Rapids.  People who worked in the paper mills, the pharmaceutical labs, the auto factories and the furniture plants are walking the streets, sitting on porches, toiling at Subway or laying on their couches. These are people who still seem shell-shocked, people who worked every day, worked hard and were proud of it, piling up the cash that came from all the hours of double-and-triple time, using that money to buy the toys for adults and children, to buy the lakeshore cottages. They are at home now wondering where it all went.”

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The auto industry’s collapse in Detroit did more than just ripple through and trickle out to the other communities of Michigan. It hit with the force of a tsunami. Michigan’s 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 them would stay on that path.

The auto industry is truly Michigan’s industry. The supply chain the industry depended on, the chain that was the life and breath of the state, spanned the width of Michigan like a monetary, industrial spider web from Detroit, through Jackson, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo to Benton Harbor, north through Cadillac and east to Alpena. Auto plants and the factories that supplied them covered Michigan with a blue-collared cloth woven by management and labor with a heavy metal fiber that was more resilient than any industry the state had known. 

Connected to those fibers in one way or another was every other economic sector in Michigan, along with every other person who called this state his or her home. Michigan made cars and trucks. Cars and trucks made Michigan.

The collapse of auto manufacturing in Detroit brought it all down.

The assembly lines that produced the vehicles America and the world depended on in the first years of the twenty-first 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. Then, state tax revenue fell. Teachers, police officers, firefighters and many of the government workers who we depended on—but at the same time took for granted—were next in the unemployment line.

The same Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings study released in June 2011 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-to-2005. However the end was near. From 2000-to-2005, the Grand Rapids region lost 18.5 percent of its manufacturing jobs.

The impact of the collapse of manufacturing in Grand Rapids was not as severe as it was in Detroit because, as the Metropolitan Policy Program study pointed out, the West Michigan economy was much more diversified at the time. 

The Grand Rapids culture also made a real difference. There was already a model of private-public-philanthropic sector collaboration that resulted in the growth of the health sciences and medical communities into jobs-producing clusters of prosperity. 

However, there was plenty of pain. The impact of the Great Recession that was really a manufacturing depression in Michigan is still being felt. The Grand Rapids Press reported in January 2012 the city had run out of money to fix its roads. “Repaving a two-mile stretch of Burton Street SE this year is to be the last such project until the city can find money and matching funds for roads.”

“It’s depressing and scary,” City Planning Director Suzanne Schulz said, “we see it as a significant issue.”

Grand Rapids was scared to death of becoming the next Detroit. The warning signs were already there. The “Kids Count in Michigan Data Book 2011” shows 20 percent, one in every five children in Kent County, live in poverty. Forty-seven percent of public school students are getting free or reduced-price school lunches.

The “Kids Count” report also showed that child abuse and neglect cases, a real indicator of the impact of poverty, have increased 34 percent over the past decade in the Grand Rapids metro area.

In Detroit, it was, and still is, much worse.

Mayor Dave Bing told Detroiters that police and fire protection could no longer be guaranteed in all of their neighborhoods. His team created a map of municipal triage. An effort would be made to save neighborhoods that were judged to be critical but not dormant or crime infested. Others that could survive on their own would be allowed to do that. However, the neighborhoods for which there is no hope would be left to the criminals, animals and vermin that have swarmed into the empty buildings and vacant lots.

Bing planned to turn out the street lights in neighborhoods that have been lost. He described that as a way to encourage those who are left in Detroit to move into neighborhoods that have a future.  It is like they are living in a John Carpenter movie.

Detroit became an international poster municipality for The Great Collapse brought about by financial malfeasance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the death of manufacturing.

Detroit, once the lynchpin of the U.S. economy, declared bankruptcy. 

Governor Rick Snyder took over that municipality and others in Michigan, placing emergency managers in their city halls, and usurping the power of elected officials. He said there was no other choice. 

The U.S. Census Bureau told us in March 2011 that Detroit’s population, which peaked at 1.8 million in 1950, had fallen to 713,777.  That included people who were staying only because their homes couldn’t be sold for enough money to allow them to start over. Many of the houses that used to be homes for families in Detroit can be had now for less than the average price of a Detroit-made automobile, about $32,000.  However, who wants to buy a house in a neighborhood where police and fire protection can’t be guaranteed or in a neighborhood without street lights?

The animals had taken over some neighborhoods, leading to a new food source and a new entrepreneurial effort to stay alive. Some people shot the critters and sold them for meat.

Here’s another sign of how bad it is in Detroit. Fire stations were running out of toilet paper. Neighbors were helping neighbors, collecting toilet paper for the firemen and women.

Does Detroit face insurmountable problems? Is there no chance of revival, or reinvention? Richard Florida wrote in The Great Reset that the city is going to need more than “…a few small pockets of hope to overcome the disappearance of its industrial legacy. It is likely to take a generation, probably two…” Florida doesn’t hold out much hope for manufacturing, either. However, we are beginning to hear voices of disagreement with that, people who believe that we have to concentrate on what we do best. People who believe  we need to invent, create, and manufacture.

Detroit has shown signs of life in its municipal ICU. Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA franchise and Quicken Loans, one of the largest employers in the Detroit area, announced a plan to revitalize downtown Detroit with an aggressive strategy of retail, office and residential construction.

This was not part of Gilbert’s plan, but Detroit was finally going to get major grocery stores so that the people who live in that city will no longer have to subsist on the Pop Tarts and slowly spinning, roasting, spitting hot dogs they buy in 24-7 gas stations.

Detroit and Meijer Inc. officials grabbed shovels and donned hard hats for a groundbreaking ceremony in May 2012 at the site of a $72 million retail complex that will be anchored by the first Meijer Supercenter ever built within the city’s borders. That followed the announcement a few days earlier that a Whole Foods store would be built in Detroit.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder called it a “great day” according to The Detroit Free Press and one of the partners in the project proclaimed, “Let’s go shopping!”

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Still, the collapse of manufacturing in Michigan has left cities like Grand Rapids, Wyoming, Kalamazoo and Detroit with giant, million-square foot, empty factory campuses.  Generations of Michigan families – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters—worked in those monuments to twentieth-century capitalism. Now those once powerful industrial campuses are nothing but empty shells, home to pigeons, rats and the homeless, who are virtual albatrosses around the neck of the twenty-first century.

Some of the antiques were flattened. Some were cut into pieces and parts for redevelopment. Some are showplaces for graffiti art. Their reinvention continues.

As bad as it is, hope remains. The eternal flame of reinvention in Michigan cannot be extinguished. Just as those great concrete, brick and mortar industrial giants that housed the assembly lines and the workers that created the vehicles that moved America and built the middle class are being reinvented, some of the auto and furniture industry supply chain survivors rising from the rubble of the Great Collapse are also finding new missions. 

They are still involved in manufacturing, but they have in some cases morphed from making cars and trucks to creating medical devices. Others are exploring partnerships with agriculture as they move into bio-manufacturing.

But where the workers?

Instead of a parade of blue-collar workers streaming to the doors of these revitalized factories, in many cases we saw robots replacing humans. 

In other cases, humans simply didn’t want to get close to a factory. The children of the Baby Boomers couldn’t imagine anything worse than “life in the plants.”

It wasn’t their fault. Many Boomers who made their livings in the plants wanted a better life for their children, dreaming of their sons and daughters as doctors and lawyers.

Little could they imagine their children would wind up behind the counter of a Starbucks, burdened with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, as the nation’s economy spasmed and broke.

To read Chapter Three, click here

© 2013 Lyons Circle Publishing

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Sometimes Things Break: The first book in the St. Isidore Collection series is the story of a man who is old enough to know better and a girl young enough to want it all. Among other things like fame and fortune, Bree wants her parents dead. Tim, among other things, wants Bree. Period. What will each have to sacrifice? Read More

For more of the St. Isidore Collection, download Rod Kackley's Free App that is available for Android and iOS devices, or go to www. rodkackley.com