Manufacturing jobs fell from 338,400 to 153,000 over the same three decades. Between 19, the number of manufacturing firms in the city dropped from over three thousand to fewer than two thousand. When auto companies mechanized or moved their operations, ancillary suppliers like machine tool companies were cut out of the supply chain and likewise forced to cut their own workforce. 34 Because Detroit was a single-industry city, decisions made by the Big Three automakers reverberated across the city’s industrial landscape.

In the years between 19, East Detroit lost ten plants and over seventy-one thousand jobs. Between 19, Chrysler, which actually kept more jobs in Detroit than either Ford or General Motors, cut its Detroit production workforce in half. A manager at a newly automated Ford engine plant in postwar Cleveland captured the interconnections between these concerns when he glibly noted to United Automobile Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther, “You are going to have trouble collecting union dues from all of these machines.” 33 More importantly, however, manufacturing firms sought to reduce labor costs by automating, downsizing, and relocating to areas with “business friendly” policies like low tax rates, anti-union right-to-work laws, and low wages.ĭetroit began to bleed industrial jobs. Mechanization also contributed to the decline of American labor.

Louis, and Philadelphia banished light industry to make room for high-rise apartments and office buildings. Municipal governments in San Francisco, St. Some cities partly deindustrialized themselves. When auto manufacturers like Ford and General Motors converted their assembly lines to build machines for the American war effort, observers dubbed the city the “arsenal of democracy.”Īfter the war, however, automobile firms began closing urban factories and moving to outlying suburbs. Perhaps no case better illustrates the decline of American industry and the creation of an intractable urban crisis than Detroit.

Segregation and discrimination perpetuated racial and gender inequalities, but unemployment continually fell and a highly progressive tax system and powerful unions lowered general income inequality as working-class standards of living nearly doubled between 19.īut general prosperity masked deeper vulnerabilities. During the so-called Great Compression, Americans of all classes benefited from postwar prosperity. Īmerican workers had made substantial material gains throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Rust belt to sunbelt migration