Man Vs. Machine Meet in Detroit; Man Losing: Mecca Gone Sour
DETROITÛÓTo economists, hard-core unemployment Is a perplexing statistic. To large industrial cities like Detroit, it is a bewildering human problem that is skyrocketing relief costs, hurting business, straining family relations and turning able-bodied men and their families into welfare cases.</br></br>Hard-core (or structural) unemployment means men who have been replaced by machines, men whose jobs have disappeared because plants closed down or moved away, men in their 40s and 50s who have no skills but once managed to make a living, men with skills no longer in demand. And it means youths who are dropping out of high school to seek jobs in a labor market that has less and less room for the unlettered and unskilled.</br></br>These are men who have been unemployed for at least six months and have little chance of ever again working for their former employer. In Detroit, thousands of men who came to the automobile plants during World War II and worked fairly steadily for 15 or more years now are unable to find a job.</br></br>THE UPSWING in automobile production this fall has reduced unemployment somewhat, but in the modern union halls, the grim houses near the big automobile plants and the cheerless neighborhood taverns, it is not hard to find men with 15 to 20 years seniority who have been out of work for two or even three years.</br></br>' From the South and the Midwest they came during and after World War II to the industrial promised land of Detroit where wages were indeed good and where jobs were hanging from every assembly line. But now, companies are leaving Detroit and other concentrated industrial centers foor smaller cities and even the countryside from which DetroitÛªs industrial army was recruited. And production methods are changing, requiring new skills, fewer men.