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NAVIGATION
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 RightMichigan.com |
So much for those spin-off jobsBy Nick, Section News
Shares of General Motors Corp. plunged to their lowest price in more than 33 years, and Ford shares hit another 52-week low Thursday as analysts continued to speculate about just how bad things will get for U.S.-based automakers.
When a news cycle starts off like that (courtesy of the Oakland Press) you know you're in for a rough read over your morning coffee. And sure enough, the hits just keep on coming. These are the same companies that have been the economic anchor for the state of Michigan for the last hundred years and the number one industrial crash test dummy for the Democrats nominee for the highest office in the land since his speech at the Detroit Economic Club last year lambasted them over an open flame. Nothing says "I love Michigan" like a firm kick to the economic... guts. In early 2005 I spent six months inside the belly of the beast, working as a genuine, real-life state employee, a regional press secretary for the House Republican caucus. Eventually my conscience overtook my pocketbook (they didn't pay particularly well to begin with) and I got the heck out of there but not before I'd become physically ill by the phrase "spin-off jobs." There wasn't a budget or legislative discussion the entire time I was with the state that someone didn't start chirping about the spin-off jobs created by the auto industry. The Big 3 are either directly responsible for 95 or 100 percent of the total jobs here in Michigan, depending on who you talk to. (110 if you talk to lobbyists from the MMA.) There are suppliers, janitorial services at the plants, coffee shops and diners near production facilities, blah blah blah. Interestingly enough, the liberal media is always anxious to play up the effect spin off jobs will have on the economy when we're adding them. They tend to forget all about them when they're going the way most moving vans. To other states. The Detroit News breaks that trend this morning by informing their readers that the recent roll backs at General Motors alone are expected to cost us upwards of ten-thousand total jobs this year alone... and that things are only going to get worse. Read on...
GM's U.S. sales are down 17 percent for the year, nearly twice the rate of the overall industry. Many analysts are predicting 2008 auto sales to fall to levels not seen since the mid-1990s... Same principles do NOT apply, apparently, at the Detroit Public Schools, where you can take schools down (they've closed plenty over the last few years) but the jobs don't disappear with them. The Ivory Tower reports:
Superintendent Connie Calloway invited CGCS to review finances, facilities and information technology operations. She credited the experts with discovering that hundreds of teachers on payroll were not within the budget.
About 611 teachers were on payroll but were not within the budget, creating a deficit of $50 million, the report states. Can't help but wonder, how many of those were math teachers? Or if anyone at the administration knows how to work an excel spreadsheet. Forgive my exasperation but how in high heck do you misplace 611 teachers? Where have they been keeping them? Did they just transfer them to other schools, keep paying them but forget to link the worksheets? If they weren't budgeted have they been accounted for in other discussions? When we hear student / teacher ratios does it factor in the phantom six-hundred? If they were off the books does that mean they've got an even lower ratio than we thought? Do they all have their own classrooms? Didn't any of the principles raise any red flags when mystery teachers started showing up, grabbing vacant rooms and demanding (and receiving!) a paycheck? Suppose the Detroit Public Schools weren't as affected by the massive regional layoffs as we might have assumed they would be. More people working, more families in the area and more school employees needed to educate their kids. The auto jobs leave for the American south and families hit the border those spin-off jobs in the schools go away too. Or not. So much at DPS makes little to no sense but this is... wow. I guess it's sort of like Jim Leyland and Justin Verlander and Gary Sheffield all say in those TV ads they run constantly during Tigers broadcasts... "In a city with the lowest graduation rate in the nation... even the school administrators can't count." OK, so maybe that's more of a paraphrase.
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