Day -70: The Rust Belt was Bamboozled
Donald Trump has promised the Rust Belt that jobs would return. No chance.
Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election can really be traced back to one (recent) historically blueish-purple place on the electoral map: the Rust Belt. Blueish-purple turned to reddish-purple on election night securing a victory for Trump.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton by less than 110,000 combined votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Clinton needed to win all three, all three were considered safely blue, and yet she lost all three. (Trump dominated both Ohio and Indiana as well.)
Trump promised over and over on the campaign trail that he’s going to bring jobs back to the United States, with an emphasis on blue collar work. This is a message that was meant to resonate with those who lived in areas where that kind of work dominates the landscape, such as the Rust Belt. As evidenced by the results on Election Day, that message was received and accepted.
But, let’s be unambiguous: those jobs are never coming back. Technology and economics have rendered numerous blue collar jobs useless. Permanently.
The Rust Belt has been a source of pride and growth for this country since the late 1800s. Wikipedia gives a great synopsis of the problems it has largely failed to address:
Following several “boom” periods from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, cities in this area in the end of the century started to struggle to adapt to a variety of adverse economic and social conditions. They include: the US steel and iron industries’ decline, the movement of manufacturing to the southeastern states with their lower labor costs, the layoffs due to the rise of automation in industrial processes, a decreased need for labor in making steel products, the internationalization of American business, and the liberalization of foreign trade policies due to globalization. Big and small cities that struggled the most with these conditions soon encountered several difficulties in common, namely: population loss and brain drain, depletion of local tax revenues, high unemployment and crime, drugs, swelling welfare rolls, poor municipal credit ratings and deficit spending.
Most of these issues are a mix of failing to understand changing demands, a subpar response to technological revolutions, and total dependency on single industries or, worse, single companies.
Hell, the man who promised to bring jobs back to the area himself used Chinese steel on his multi-billion dollar real estate projects. Again, the man who promises to fix it as president, substantially contributed to the problem as a regular citizen. Why? Because it made fiscal sense.
Trump promised that those companies and industries are coming back long-term. They aren’t. At least not with his vision. Can re-examining foreign trade deals have an effect? Sure, but it’ll be minimal. Can increased mining for coal provide a bump? Yes, but it’ll be short-term as demand for coal has stagnated. As James Conca with Forbes articulated, “It doesn’t make a lot of financial sense to expand coal use again within the United States.” The economics just aren’t there for coal.
In the highly unlikely event companies do return in droves, automation will be high: what used to be the job of numerous low-skilled industrial laborers can be done by machines with limited engineers overseeing the work. The need for low-skilled workers still exists in the United States, but shrinks by the day.
The Rust Belt can hope those jobs will return. The president-elect can promise those jobs will return. But, there’s nothing incentiving those jobs to return.
The Rust Belt must reinvent themselves: aggressively pursue inclusion in emerging industries; take advantage of the quality colleges and universities in the area; use the premise of cheap land and strategic location to attract smart, long-lasting, diverse companies to expand there. In short, don’t be the bottom feeder waiting at the bottom of the pond for something to drop down for you to eat. Go catch something, because Donald Trump isn’t dropping anything down.
Evolve or die. The companies have chosen to evolve, the Rust Belt hasn’t. Time is running out.
-70 days in, 1531 to go.
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