Bad Things Happen

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The blue-collar middle class in the U.S.was built on manufacturing productionjobs, but their number has dwindled. In

major cities of the North, as the chart shows,the decline has been particularly steep. Fur-thermore, pay for these jobs, unlike that forhighly skilled workers such as engineers, hasdeclined relative to the national average. Sev-eral decades ago the typical production-linejob did not require advanced skills but wasunionized and so paid at or above the aver-age. By 1997, however, production-line paydropped below the average in most areas ofthe U.S., except where unions were stillstrong, such as in Detroit.

As manufacturing jobs dried up and old-er workers took early retirement, young peo-ple, instead of becoming assemblers or ma-chine operators, became janitors and waiters.Such service-sector positions generally paidless than production work. The better-payingjobs were in hard-to-reach suburbs.

These disincentives left many young menunemployed. At about the same time, for rea-sons that are still not completely understoodbut that may include a dearth of eligiblewage-earning men, the number of unmarriedteenage mothers soared. Generally, these girlswere not only economically insecure butlacked parenting skills, and so it is not sur-prising that their children tended to be dis-

advantaged. The children, moreover, grewup in neighborhoods that were coming apart.Churches, social clubs and unions—especial-ly in black communities—were dissolving, inpart because higher-income people fled, de-priving the areas of key resources and rolemodels for children. Black newspapers, oncea vibrant force in many communities, all butdisappeared.

These developments contributed to thesurge in youth gangs and crime beginning inthe 1960s. Other changes fed the crime wave,such as a large increase in the number ofyoung men between the ages of 18 and 35,the most crime-prone age group, and the in-creasing availability of illegal drugs, partic-ularly crack, which appeared in the 1980s.

Loss of jobs, together with a shortage ofaffordable housing that followed neighbor-hood gentrification and failure to maintain ex-isting housing, added to the rising number ofhomeless people beginning in the 1970s. Thelegally mandated emptying of psychiatric hos-pitals was a factor in escalated homelessness,though apparently not a precipitating cause.

There are signs of improvement through-out the country as a whole. The number ofbabies born to teenage mothers has followeda downward trend since 1994; the povertyrate is below the level of a decade ago; druguse is down from the high levels of the 1980s;and most significantly, crime rates haveplummeted since 1992.

But other signals suggest that the legacy ofdeindustrialization lingers. Wages of the bot-tom quarter of Americans have improved lit-tle in the past 25 years, and unions, which pro-vided a measure of stability to working-classneighborhoods, have been severely weakened.According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors,homelessness and hunger went up sharply lastyear. Perhaps the most troubling news is thatemployment among young, undereducatedblack males fell from 62 percent in 1979 to 52percent by the period 1999–2000, a develop-ment that probably traces in part to the declineof manufacturing production jobs.

Rodger Doyle can be reached atrdoyle2@adelphia.net

Bad Things HappenHOW DEINDUSTRIALIZATION HAS AFFECTED COMMUNITIES BY RODGER DOYLE

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Pay of manufacturing productionworkers in 1997 as a percent of average pay in:

Los Angeles 68

Chicago 82

San Jose, Calif. 73

Orange County, Calif. 76

New York City 46

Houston 88

Phoenix 85

Detroit 111

San Diego 84

Cleveland 105

Philadelphia 91

Pittsburgh 103

Boston 89

U.S. metropolitan areas 88

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Census ofManufactures. Data are for home countiesof cities. In 1997 production workersaccounted for 72 percent of allmanufacturing employment.

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