Is Windsor the new Flint? - Or Easter Island?
I was at waiting for my daughter’s physio session to finish the other day and I was flipping through a book all about the auto industry in Windsor. I can’t recall the name of the book, I do remember it was co-written by CBC journalist Herb Colling. The book details the rise of the car, in the Windsor area, from the partnership of McGregor and Ford on.
What struck me was the labour intensity of manufacturing. Thousands and then tens of thousands of Windsorites were required to produce cars and the necessary parts. And here in Windsor we made nearly every part required.
And, we didn’t just build cars we made lots of things that people needed. Somewhere along the way many of these local companies closed, or were bought-out and moved to larger centres (or overseas). So, it strikes me funny sometimes, when people say that Windsor needs to diversify its economy.
Looking at the 2006 census data for the Windsor Metropolitan Area shows that our “workforce” numbers just about 105,000. Of those, 25,000 work in manufacturing. I have heard it said that once-upon-a-time in this city one in three jobs were with the Big 3. Now we’re at one in four in “manufacturing” not just car plants. We already know more auto jobs are leaving the city and its unlikely that they will come back so that ratio will change a bit more.
What I got to wondering about was this - are we actually diversifying our economy, adding new jobs, in new directions or, are we just eliminating jobs from one sector and changing the percentages across the board? Every morning I get to look at the Lear plant coming down. How many jobs came and went with that plant? Then I go past the former Riverside Stamping plant. Its painted bright blue and green and has been converted to a self-storage facility. Another relic - what d’ya figure - four maybe six employees to man the gate, keep an eye on other people’s shit? That’s a depressing scenario. The exchange of one hundred or more decent paying jobs in exchange for a handful of babysitting positions.
In the new economy, of lower wages and fewer or no benefits, how many of our “diversified” jobs will remain when so many of them depend on employees with extended medical benefits, or disposable income?
We all know that the people of Easter Island had a thriving society that revolved around fishing. Fishing requied boats, boats made out of trees and eventually they cut down too many trees to keep their forests healthy, disrupted the balance and the rest is history. I hope in our rush to make more stuff for less, somewhere else, we haven’t cut down too many “plants” to maintain the balance.
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James, throughout all your posts, I don’t remember if you’ve even brought up:
The Jevons Paradox is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
Now think of that in terms of making our stuff more efficient and more efficiently. Hybrids and small cheap cars like the Tata will only see us prolong our “happy motoring” society burning up our remaining oil quicker
P.S. I want to open up a Tata Dealership under the name “Bodacious”
Bodacious - gigity!
Efficiency was supposed to give us shorter work weeks and more family time. We were supposed to be living these great lives with lots of freedom and yet…mostly we’ve used efficiency to downsize companies, outsource work (even knowledge based work) and eliminate jobs for people to go to.
Huh. Now I see how efficiency gives us more leisure time - no jobs to go to.
Just a clarification on the Jevons Paradox. It with most consumable goods but not all.
Oil, electricity for one is not affected. Because Mark you are correct technology when stated “that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used”. However studies show that electricity and oils major losses are not caused by consumption but by loss of refinement and production; mostly in wasted heat.
We need to stop counting the amount of oil barrels and instead look at ways of producing more efficiently. That is where the savings begin.
James, I agree that the diversification will continue but with lower wages and benefits but for two reasons.
1) the double-edged sword of globilization. It has brought stability in many parts of the world along with food and clean drinking water and better health, while racing to the bottom of the lowest common denominator.
2) N. Americans have undoubtedly lived way beyond our means for half a century while wantign cheaper and cheaper goods. We are a product of our own greed. We can’t have cheap products and outlandish wages at the same time.
We can look back only 100 years and see how Windsor truly had a diversified economy. We made parts for everything, we had foodstuffs, textiles etc. Now we can’t findmany of these in our entire country!
I believe you are correct. Either this is a correction of economic scale that has been coming for the last two decades or we will end up like Easter Island. Both are going to be painful regardless of the outcome.
Actually they the archeologists think that the deforestation of Easter Island came about not by building fishing boats but cutting down all the trees to use them as rollers to move all those massive stones! Thus Windsor will be more like Flint than Easter Island, since we aren’t mining Windsor for the iron ore to make the steel, to make the cars that nobody can afford anymore!
The reference I went from was Jared Diamond’s in his book Collapse. My thinking was that without the trees the islanders lost their means to fish (feed themselves) and build shelter.
In Windsor, (and most of North America) we have taken away the factories and the jobs that go with them. We’ve lost our means to make things of value which ultimately generate wealth. When we come out of this dark economic period we will not have the factories and shops that we have demolished nor, will the capital be readily available to build new factories and shops. A tree needs many interdependent conditions to grow and thrive and produce seeds and generations to become a forest. Many of the interdependent conditions that made Windsor the Automotive Capital of Canada have disappeared.
And, like that island without its trees, we will have to deal with erosion.
Flint given free airtime in Ottawa - (Or we should be careful or sensitive to those in Flint!)
http://tiny.cc/OQP27
“OTTAWA — Two Ottawa radio stations are giving $60,000 in free airtime to the tourism bureau in Flint, Michigan, their way of making peace with residents of the town who were angered after the stations ran ads comparing today’s Ottawa to Flint in the late 1980s.
The spring ad campaign for Live 88.5 and Hot 89.9 was intended to cheer up Ottawa residents about the local economy, and reassure consumers to get them spending.
The campaign, known by the tagline “This Ain’t Flint,” compared Ottawa to Flint, which suffered massive layoffs in the auto industry 20 years ago. The radio and bus shelter ads drew visitors to a website with a short video about life in Ottawa compared life in Flint in 1989, as well as news articles on the economy and links to websites for the stations and the advertising agency that created the campaign.
The video was inspired by Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me about the town’s problems in the aftermath of the layoffs.
But it drew criticism from a handful of Ottawa communications professionals who said the ads were not only insulting to Flint, but were poorly written and badly executed.
The stations received thousands of angry e-mails from Flint residents who didn’t see the point of comparing a struggling manufacturing town to a national capital city. ..
..Preston says Flint is transforming from a factory town to a college town, with 30,000 students going to school there.”