Some have said that Detroit is the absolute worst area in the country right now in terms of economic factors. A website I visit frequently has called the Michigan city “Ground Zero for the American Nightmare,” and I personally believe that this is true. Within the Detroit metro area, hundreds of thousands of people are out of work and unable to find jobs. Some have been in that condition for over a year, with no end in sight to their misery. Officially, Detroit’s unemployment rate is twenty-seven percent – that’s what’s on record. But many experts, including the city’s own mayor, would put that number closely to fifty percent when figures harder to calculate (such as underemployment and those who have given up on finding a job at all) are taken into account.
The decline of the domestic auto industry had an especially big impact on Detroit, long called the Motor City. Things have gotten especially bad in this area in recent years, but problems have been mounting for years. Many factories have been closed and moved to foreign counties in recent decades, taking thousands of jobs with them. Off-shoring is a problem all over the country, but Detroit seems to be an especially virulent microcosm for the rest of the country in this regard. The blame lies with greedy manufacturers who shipped millions of jobs off to places like China, India, and Mexico where workers could be paid pennies on the dollars paid to Americans. But it also lies with the federal lawmakers who did nothing about it, say experts.
Now, the unemployed blue-collar workers of Detroit are finding themselves in direct competition with these overseas workers who stole their jobs. And there is no way to compete. With one of every two workers in Detroit out of a job at present, when will the madness cease?
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