My first activity of today brought me to a middle-school age city-league football game that my nephew was playing in (lost 8 - 18) As i walked, alone with my thoughts, to my car, i realized something was odd in the parking lot. There in that completely full high-school lot was not a single foreign-made automobile, as best i could see. The school was in Taylor, perhaps the most blue-collar city of a blue-collar metropolis. I also noticed that the back of the lot was filled with the work trucks, while the full-size sedans dominated the front of the lot; this I concluded was a result of the fathers- Their pick-ups, vans and a hodgepodge of trucks with ladders, tools and various company emblems on their doors and fenders- parking in the rear, arriving after the mother's and children had come to set up and prepare for the game. Exactly as my brother and his family had.
g-g-g- g unit
This week Ford announced they would cut 1/3 of their white-collar work force, offering buy-outs to some and chopping what's needed after that. What you won't hear in the media is about the average white-collar employee age at ford is several years younger than GM, which is why this round of cuts will be particularly painful compared to GM's. 14,000 professionals will be moving on with lives. Meanwhile, back at the struggle, every street-block (of ~15 houses) has at least 2 or 3 homes for sale. Multiply that by what's easily a hundred blocks in my neighborhood and you can start to understand what's happening here. See, while the white-collars predominately occupy the northern suburbs, here in the south-side, we're surrounded by the factory workers. Every one of the 75,000 union employees, many of whom who've been working erratic schedules, such as one week mandatory vacation per month, will be offered a retirement package, in an attempt to align the number of workers with what's needed to run a company with several fewer manufacturing plants.
Every day i'm hustling
There is a saying that says, "As Detroit goes, so goes the country." The feeling here... is off. Something is very off.
2 comments:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe you should take advantage of this situation and become a realistate mogue in the greater Detroit Area... Then invent some reason for people to want to live there... then charge them rent!
Its a good thing who ever came up with that saying about detroit was wrong.
I did hear a good quote on the local news the other night, they were interviewing people about the latest murder in north minneapolis, and one guy said something to the effect of "man, this ain't bad, i used to live in detroit, now that's bad."
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