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CIAO DATE: 10/5/2006
Bearing the Brunt: Manufacturing Job Loss in the Great Lakes Region, 1995-2005
Howard Wial, Alec Friedhoff
July 2006
Abstract
More than 47,000 workers at General Motors and auto parts supplier Delphi Corp. recently accepted early retirement offers or buyouts to leave their jobs. When those workers depart by the end of 2006, the two companies will have reduced their combined hourly workforces in the United States by about one-third. Job cuts in U.S. manufacturing, however, extend well beyond the auto industry and the state of Michigan and are having a profound effect on local economies throughout the Great Lakes region.
This report examines recent trends in manufacturing employment in seven states of the Great Lakes manufacturing belt and in the 25 largest manufacturing-dependent metropolitan areas in those states. Trends are compared with information on manufacturing output and on employment in the advanced service sector, consisting of the information, financial activities, and professional and business services industries. As with manufacturing, these industries both pay higher-than-average wages and generate export income for their home regions.2 Because of their relatively high wages and exportability, and because, unlike manufacturing, they have added jobs during the past decade, the advanced services sector has the potential to be a foundation for high-wage regional economic development.
