The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Manufacturing's Worker-less Future

The picture of manufacturing's future in America is coming into focus, and it's not pretty. A region like the Midwest, that hopes its glory days of industrial power will come back, should take heed.  

The signs are everywhere, especially in the collapse of manufacturing employment when the recession began and the slow recovery since then. But some recent articles highlighted the changing nature of manufacturing -- the growing use of robots to do jobs that men and women used to do, the increasing ability of corporations to hammer down wages and benefits, and a growing skepticism about the much-vaunted shortage of highly-skilled manufacturing workers and the willingness of companies to pay for them.

If there's a link in these stories, it's the global economy and its impact on manufacturing. Much manufacturing has gone overseas, forcing Midwestern workers to compete for jobs with workers in China and other countries making one-tenth as much as they do. Employers who don't want to pay American-style wages but are dissatisfied with Chinese-style quality have two choices -- push down wages or turn to robots, which never take coffee breaks and don't get pensions.

Both are happening.

A Lifeline from the World

As the global economy concentrates in cities, it has left behind a hinterland -- too often a wasteland -- of old factory cities and rural towns literally cut off from the global conversation.

It's easy --and wrong -- to say that the people in these towns are globalization's leftovers, men and women who can't cut it in this new economy, refugees happily hiding from the rest of the world, with no interest in that world and nothing to say about it. Many do indeed feel like castaways, but they long for more links with a world that has passed them by.

The Midwest Rules

With the selection of Paul Ryan as the probable Republican vice presidential candidate, this year's election has become mostly a battle between Midwesterners.

Not since 1976, when Gerald Ford (Nebraska/Michigan) and Bob Dole (Kansas) led the GOP ticket and Walter Mondale (Minnesota) became Jimmy Carter's VP, have three of the four spots at the top of the two major party tickets been filled by politicians with roots or careers in the Midwest.

Barack Obama (Illinois), Mitt Romney (Michigan) and Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) are all sons of the Midwest --- indeed, the inner Midwest, the real Midwest, the old industrial heartland clustered around the Great Lakes.

But if they share a geography, that's about it. One can't imagine three more different men less shaped into a common mold. If geography is destiny, it's hard to see it in these candidates.

A Vote For Ignorance

The voters of Missouri, by an overwhelming margin, have just voted to cripple their state in the global economic sweepstakes and to permit their children to be uneducated and unemployable in that economy.

The ballot in the election this week didn't say exactly that, of course, and the decision is unlikely to survive court challenges. But its impact is clear: as an example of a state surrendering its economic future to religious rigidity and political pandering, it's hard to beat.

The vote was on something called Amendment 2, which amended the state constitution to give Missourians -- including children in school -- the right to express their religious beliefs. That's what the official ballot title said. The official ballot language -- a sort of summary of the amendment -- said "that a citizen's right to express their (sic) religious beliefs regardless of their religion shall not be infringed and that the right to worship includes prayer in private or public settings, on government premises, on public property and in all public schools."

So far, so bad. Both the Missouri and the American Constitutions already guarantee freedom of religion, so that part of the amendment is unnecessary. Prayer in school and on government premises may or may not violate separation of church and state, but the amendment's language invites a court challenge that Missouri is likely to lose.

A Cluster Grows in Chicago

There's been a run of good news for Chicago recently which, apart from giving Mayor Rahm Emanuel some happy headlines, tell us something about the nature of global cities, about the shape of this new economy, and about who wins and who loses.

The stories involved the decision of three tech-heavy companies to locate in the Loop, Chicago's downtown, or in River North, the trendy area just north of the Loop. Two of the companies, like several others recently, announced they will leave the suburbs to move into the city.

Interestingly, Emanuel didn't have to bribe the companies with tax breaks and other incentives to get them to move downtown. The mayor, like other governors and mayors, has been criticized recently for using taxpayers' money to lure suburban companies into the city, a move that does nothing to increase regional employment or economic vitality.

These moves are different, more complex and more interesting.