Job Study: Detriot and Chicago Hit Hardest

The Detriot News reports:

The 21st century has been brutal on seven Great Lakes states, where the loss of 1.1 million factory jobs since 2000 represents the largest number of jobs to vanish so quickly from any U.S. sector since at least 1939, according to a report to be released today by a Washington think tank.

Michigan is at ground zero in the devastation. Nearly one of every four Michigan factory workers lost a job between 2000 and 2005, according to The Brookings Institution report, titled "Bearing the Brunt: Manufacturing Job Loss in the Great Lakes Region."

That adds up to 218,000 workers, or 24.3 percent of all manufacturing jobs in the state. In the Metro Detroit area, 103,300 factory jobs vanished, which accounts for 62.3 percent of all jobs lost in the region since 2000.

The evaporation of factory jobs in Michigan and the Great Lakes states isn't new, but The Brooking Institution report quantifies the magnitude of those losses over the past decade, particularly in the past five years.

"There isn't any comparable period going back to 1939 where the loss has been so severe" from any one U.S. sector in a five-year period, said Howard Wial, Brookings Institution economist and the report's author. Wial said data wasn't kept before 1939.

The massive job loss is not just a cyclical downturn, many experts contend, but evidence of deep structural changes brought upon by technology, global competition and cheap foreign labor.

Among other findings from the analysis:

From 1995 to 2005, the nation lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs, and nearly all of the lost jobs have occurred since 2000.

More than one third of those jobs lost occurred in the seven Great Lakes states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Those seven states still hold one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Detroit and Chicago lost the most manufacturing jobs, over 100,000 jobs each, since 2000.

When unions can buy politicians like they have in Chicago and Detriot look at the results:high taxes,regulations,and a hostility to job growth.Maryann Mahaffey is just another name for unemployment.Here's the Brookings Institute report.(PDF)