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

It’s always terrible to hear about people losing their jobs — but it seems even worse in a bad recession and in a place like McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, a call center that employed 600 - and had received considerable tax abatements from local governments - announced it would be shutting down.
You can read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s coverage, or the excellent post by McKeesport blogger Jason Togyer.
I think some (like Togyer) would say this situation shows the folly of expecting low-wage, easily outsourceable service jobs to replace the manufacturing jobs …

I know we’ve had a lot on this blog about the current recession and how hard it has hit the auto industry and Michigan.
So, I apologize if you’re sick of reading about it, but I’m posting a link to this sobering Wall Street Journal Story about laid-off white collar workers.
“Mr. Barr, 46 years old, was the type of well-educated, white-collar ‘knowledge’ worker that Michigan hoped would help offset a decline in auto-assembly jobs. But Detroit’s Big Three car makers have aggressively thinned these ranks in the past two years, perhaps …

Reuters is running a story about the precipitous job losses in Southern states.

While during the house boom, these states enjoyed relatively low unemployment rates, many have now seen jobless tolls reach the double digits.
Georgia weighs in at 10%; North Carolina, 11%. South Carolina bests them both with 12.1%.
Florida has been especially hard hit because of declines in the tourism industry.
A friend of mine just moved to Charleston and she said the job market there is terrible. Everyone she knows is a server, she said. I was surprised.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, but the United States and Canada aren’t the only places that have suffered from factory shutdowns and a loss of manufacturing jobs.
This article details how the current recession is hurting the steel industry in Hungary. This more in-depth story from Reuters also explores the same issue.
Some of the quotes in this story are striking in that they sound like they could easily be about workers or regions here in the U.S.:
“In its heyday in the 1980s. the city of Miskolc had more than 200,000 residents, …

A new report (pdf), as reported by a number of Ohio’s news sources, predicts a depressing future for Ohio’s ability to attract and retain young people.
The worse news is that its not just out-of-state students who are down on the buckeye state; the report finds that 51% of Ohio natives don’t want to stay. Having spent the past four years as an undergraduate student at two of Northeast Ohio’s universities, I can honestly testify that these numbers seem quite reasonable and realistic.

Some people are questioning the survey’s methodology and suggesting …

A sad story about Toledo in Sunday’s Washington Post.
The article describes how the downturn in the economy is hitting white-collar workers- hard. (I should know, I’m one of them!)
“In this corner of Ohio, the workforce is contracting at an alarming speed, with unemployment climbing to rates more typical of counties in Appalachia,” the article states. “In March, unemployment in Toledo reached 12.6 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent over March 2008.”

Kudos to Portfolio magazine writer Ryan Avent for challenging the flawed consensus among economists about the government’s role in declining post-industrial cities.
We published a New York Times article several weeks ago from economist Edward Glaeser who that said migration away from Rust Belt cities was healthy in terms of economic efficiency. Any special government aid to Rust Belt cities such as Detroit would only delay necessary economic mobility.
This is how the argument goes: basically, the faster people leave Buffalo and Detroit and Ohio and Indiana and their high unemployment rates for …

Here’s more confirmation that not all areas of the country are suffering equally in this recession:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/how-some-places-fare-better-in-hard-times/
“Unemployment today, as in previous recessions, is strongly linked to manufacturing. Old-line industries, like car manufacturing, have been declining for decades, and such industries are also more likely to lay off masses of workers during a downturn.”
We already knew places like Ohio and Michigan are worse off; this blog post has some interesting charts that show how bad the disparity is.