BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND
KENNETH B. ACKERMAN
basictraining
Flint, Mich.—Goodnight and goodbye
(when local economies collapse)
IT’S AN OLD LINE, AND NOT VERY FUNNY ANYmore: “Will the last person to leave (fill in name of
city) please turn out the lights?” We’re not picking
on Flint for the sake of beating up on the downtrodden, but Flint is an exemplar—the poster
child—for communities in economic death throes.
The dynamics of community collapse are complex; Flint has been dying for well over 25 years. But
at the core, the issue is that Flint is irrelevant to
global automotive supply chains, and that’s the
death knell. Hey, Flint is irrelevant to domestic
automotive supply chains. It may even be irrelevant
to the General Motors supply chain.
We tend to think of these collapses in terms of manufacturing, but there are frequently distribution operations closely tied in with manufacturing operations.
And there are distribution facilities and operations
that can bring down communities when they fail.
There are many reasons for distribution center
job losses. An obvious one is the shutdown of the
parent manufacturer. Another would be a radical
change in sourcing—the network must be reconfigured if goods begin arriving at Los Angeles/Long
Beach instead of coming from the next town over.
So, this is a supply chain issue at its core.
When a distribution center closes, all may not be
lost. If the facility is located in a natural distribu-tion-centric location like Atlanta, Columbus, or
Memphis, there may be other jobs in the area, later
if not sooner. But if the facility is a legacy of a long-ago acquisition, stands alone in a remote location,
or otherwise falls outside the lines of a rationalized
distribution network, the lost jobs may have disappeared forever.
Looming realities
It is time to face some grim facts. Those lost manu-
facturing and distribution jobs aren’t going to mag-
ically reappear “when things get better”—not when
production has gone to Asia or Central America or
even elsewhere in the country. They’re probably not
going to be replaced by equally high-paying posi-
tions that use the skills that were useful in the old
jobs. For sure, they won’t come back because of
pronouncements by politicians who exploit the
human tragedies involved in order to grab a few
more votes.
Cowboy up and deal
with it
We don’t want to gloss over
the genuine misery of real
people who get caught up
in local economic collapse.
And training in 21st century skills is a must, whatever
the next steps for a town or
an industry. But simply
having a capable workforce more or less in place
isn’t enough to attract industry—and jobs—to a
depressed area.
The idea of spending public money (stimulus
package or other) on the suffering community may
appeal to our humanitarian instincts. But these are
generally sops, without long-term and sustainable
benefit.
We have got to learn the battlefield hospital techniques of triage. This does emphatically not mean
that the most severe cases get the most attention
soonest. Somewhat the opposite—the most dire
cases, the terminally injured, don’t get any attention, and rescue efforts are poured into those with a
fighting chance of making it. We need to learn to do
the same with economically wounded communities. Our resources need to be concentrated on
those that can come back and play productive
value-adding roles in a new economic model. That
