Who is benefiting from the strides being made to redevelop the city of Youngstown?
That is the question posed by Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University, in a critical article titled “A Renaissance for Whom?”

The authors point out that despite the success of high-tech start-ups in the city’s downtown, the average city resident has seen her fortunes decline during the current recession. And the situation wasn’t pretty before that.
“Much has been written recently about Youngstown’s Renaissance,” write YSU professors James Rhodes and John Russo on the CWCS’s blog. …

“Keep Cleveland working!”was the chorus outside a Hugo Boss plant in west Cleveland this January.
The plant had been scheduled for outsourcing by overseas executives that spring. 350 people were told they were losing their jobs, despite the fact that the plant was turning a profit for the high-end suitmaker.
The Plain Dealer is carrying a great article about the struggle to save Cleveland’s Hugo Boss factory, Northeast Ohio’s last textile plant. The story follows the leadership of two women employees in a courageous and ultimately successful campaign to save their jobs. …

” A long time ago, things got broken here.”

“People got sad and left.”

“Maybe the world gets broken so we can have some work to do.”

“People think there aren’t any frontiers anymore. They can’t see that there are frontiers all around us.”

-Braddock, Pennsylvania

This is the script from a relatively new Levi’s commercial.

Video after the jump.

Has anyone seen the HBO Movie The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant?
It looks like it came out last year, so I’m a little late on this one. It is focused on the last few months of a plant in Moraine, Ohio (near Dayton).
-KG

The Akron Beacon Journal is carrying an interesting editorial about the economic status of young people in the Buckeye State.

In the article Amy Hanauer, executive director of the liberal, Cleveland-based think tank Policy Matters Ohio, argues that high college costs, declining middle-class wages and increasing basic costs are disproportionally squeezing Ohio’s young people.

“Skyrocketing costs make it difficult for students to complete their degrees, employment has become less stable, earnings have declined steeply for workers without a four-year college degree, and young adults are increasingly saddled with debt,” she writes, with co-author Nancy Cauthen.

Good Magazine is reporting that four Detroit High Schools will begin training students to work at Wal-Mart.
Students will receive 10 credits for 11 weeks of job readiness preparation with the retail giant.
Advocates say it’s a good opportunity for students, given the city’s staggering unemployment rate.
Advocates for the poor say the students are being trained for dead-end jobs and lives of subserviance.

-AS

The Associated Press has conducted an inventory of the 128 auto plants closed by the Big Three since 1980 and the results are discouraging.
Only about three in five has been repurposed for a new use. Those that have been reopened are employing far few workers at lower wages.

“The cost is going to be borne by the next generation,” said James Rubenstein, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who has studied U.S. auto plant closings and openings. “It’s the children and grandchildren of the laid-off workers. They won’t have …

I took off on a road trip across the Rust Belt this summer both because I saw it as a potential for some good stories (which you can find here) and because it seemed like a great opportunity to visit a part of the country that I knew solely through reading and conversation. I also veered a bit out of the Rust Belt’s traditional boundaries to do a story for NPR’s Latino USA (scroll down and then listen here) on immigrant urban farmers in Cincinnati.

And it turns out I wasn’t the only person with such ideas. One group of planning students from Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois made a similar trip, calling it “Rust Belt Road Trip.” Another group did the same thing as well. It has to be more than the catchy alliteration–there must be something in the air.

On Saturday, I participated in a “cycle through Pittsburgh’s industrial heritage tour” run by the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area.

We met on the South Side at Station Square, where our knowledgeable guides gave us very detailed descriptions of the heavily industrialized landscape that used to occupy the ground we now stood on.
I won’t try to repeat the multitude of information they gave us, but I do want to give you a flavor of the great ride we took!
We cycled along the river…

to the South Side Works,

now a mixed use …

Sorry to have so many Pittsburgh-centric stories posted at once, but this one is pretty interesting.
Historians, labor folks, and activists in the Pittsburgh area will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Pressed Steel Car Strike on Saturday, where at least 12 people died in 1909.
There were several articles about the strike and its implications in Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Read about the day’s activities, including a church service, march, marker unveiling, and concert with the Springsteen-esque Mike Stout and the Human Union here.
Read more about how the site is being preserved …