Today the last Chevy Tahoe produced in Janesville, Wisconsin rolled off the assembly line. General Motors donated the sport utility to the local United Way which plans to auction it off later. While the money the United Way is likely to make from the raffle will help the charity, it won't plug the $400,000 deficit United Way of Rock County faces next year.
The closing today of GM's 90-year-old Janesville assembly plant is leaving a gaping hole in the community, including the United Way. It is only one charity that has depended on the generosity of GM employees for years and now must look elsewhere for funding.
Janesville could become a metaphor for other communities in the U.S. facing the loss of an auto plant or some other factory. Janesville is losing about 4,000 auto-related jobs, but many more people are being affected by those losses. Rock County's Salvation Army expects to see more extended families of auto workers seeking assistance. Captain Carolyn Schuetz says the children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews of auto workers often depend on those folks for financial help. That financial assistance isn't likely to be there now.
If the economy worsens and if the U.S. auto industry can't right itself, we may see a lot more Janesvilles struggling to survive.
Comments
No one on NBR addresses systemic market problems.
This depression has been caused by faux productivity among financial industries at the expense of manufacturing real assets. Usury at banks and credit card companies was unleashed despite centuries of recognition that it would transfer too much wealth to too few members of the community. Compensation for executives at financial institution were based on apparent monetary value and not real value to the society. We are at more of a crisis than tradtional economists and monetarists can conceive. Until we see sustainability as a real value and growth as having become a societal cancer we are in the soup. You need to interview economists who embrace sustainable economics such as Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, Charles Hall even Stiglitz would be a welcome alternative point of view which you resolutely ignore.