auto industry

Where Are or Were The Jobs?

/ Jim Luke / 1 Comment

With the all the alleged concern in Washington now from both parties about job creation, there’s something that’s missing in much of the debate: facts.  So let’s take a look at some.  I really like graphics like the one below.  They’re complex and take quite some time to read and fully absorb what’s there, but they pack a lot of information into a small space.  They’re info-dense.

We hear from the left a lot of talk about “good” vs. “bad” jobs.  Often what they are referring to is the relative wage level of the jobs.  In general, manufacturing and government jobs are “good” because they tend to have slightly higher than average wages*.  Education and health services jobs are a mixed bag with a lot of variation.  Doctors, nurses, and admins do very well.  Home health aides and assisted living workers not so much.  Teachers are either good or bad depending on the state. Leisure and hospitality are generally panned as below-average.

From the right we hear claims that heavily unionized sectors like motor vehicles, parts and manufacturing are holding down growth and killing jobs.  We also hear political conservatives claiming that excessive growth of the government sector has somehow prevented the private sector from adding jobs.

We also hear from the left that it’s lack of demand that is keeping unemployment high.  The right like to claim the unemployment is structural – we have the wrong workforce with the wrong skills.

But what’s really happened?  How have the different policies of Bush and Obama (to the degree they’re different – they aren’t as different as some think) affected the employment picture?  Let’s look a this graph from David Altig, Senior VP at the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank as posted at macroblog.  It helps to click and enlarge the graph in a new window/tab.

Click to Enlarge

First, let’s examine how the graph is structured.  As always, it’s important to make sure we understand a graph’s axes first.  Horizontally, we have the average monthly change in employment in percentage between Dec. 2001 and Oct. 2007.  This period covers all of the non-recession portion of the G.W. Bush administration.  Industries to the reader’s right grew strongly and thrived under the Bush administration’s policies.  Industries to the reader’s left shrunk. No growth is the zero or mid-line. Next, the vertical axis shows a similar measure, average monthly percent increase in employment, but it’s for the period of July 2009 through Aug. 2011.  This is the non-recessionary months of the Obama administration.  Industries located high up grew under the Obama recovery. Industries low on the scale shrunk and cut jobs during Obama’s recovery.  There’s no tricks here of cherry-picking time periods – both axes cover only the “recovery” portion of each president’s respective time in office.

So looking overall, we have the four quadrants.  The upper right shows industries that have added jobs under both presidents’ recoveries. The lower left are industries that have been cutting jobs under both presidents. Upper left would be winners under Obama but not Bush. Lower right are those sectors that have been cutting employment under Obama but were big growth sectors under Bush.  Finally, the size of each bubble indicates the relative importance of the industry in terms of jobs.

So what can we conclude?  First there are few items that aren’t so surprising.

  • Under Bush, a lot of the employment growth involved construction and financial activities.  Not surprising. This is the Wall Street driven housing and mortgage bubble. Frankly we don’t need that big of construction sector, at least not if it’s focused on housing as it was.  We have too much housing already.  We do have needs for more construction of infrastructure and to the degree that housing construction workers are either in the wrong location or don’t have the skills for infrastructure construction (I don’t know – it’s not my expertise), then the low employment growth under Obama here represents a  structural unemployment problem.  But notice that industry isn’t that big.  Also, we probably don’t want to have Financial Activities come back as big as they were before.
  • The big winners under Bush were Education and Health Services and Professional/Business Services.  In education and health, health dominated.  Not surprising, health care spending has been growing and the population is becoming older and/or sicker.   The growth in professional/business services is probably not really very productive stuff.  A very, very large part of the increase in that area was the huge increase in security personnel and related-security contracting that has arisen from an increasing paranoid insecure society since 9/11.
But there are some items here which are surprising, or at least surprising if you’re believe the normal political rhetoric.
  • First, it was Bush who grew government employment.  Under Obama, government employment has been negative since the recession ended. Shrinking government employment is clearly the single largest drag on the economy. That’s not ideology or belief talking. It’s facts and data.
  • Second, the big reason why the Bush recovery was such a slow recovery for employment, considering the 2001 recession was mild, is that throughout the Bush administration manufacturing shrunk dramatically.  This was the result of globalization policies that provided incentives for U.S. manufacturing firms to locate production overseas or to buy from overseas manufacturers instead of making their own.  Fast growing companies like Apple and other computer companies prefer to design it themselves but to contract with foreign firms for manufacture. Obama has not turned the corner on manufacturing employment, but he has stopped the bleeding. For the U.S. to recover, this sector needs to have positive growth.  Given it’s size, it’s not necessary to rise to the top in percentage terms, but it needs to be positive which it isn’t now.
  • “Manufacturing” does not mean “autos”.  Manufacturing is much worse than Motor Vehicles and Parts.  Too often when politicians talk “manufacturing” they conjure a stereotypical image of auto manufacturing.  In reality, motor vehicles and parts, while not being a source of growth under either, has essentially held it’s own as neutral.
  • The Information industry is the one industry that has shrunk under both recoveries, although it’s not that large.  This largely represents true sectoral, innovation-driven change as the World Wide Web changes information technology.
Finally, let’s see what this graph says about the controversy over is unemployment structural (in which case we need training and incentives to work) or is it a lack of aggregate demand (in which case we need more stimulus spending).  I think the graph is relatively clear in this regard.  We have three very, very large sectors where there is no increase in employment under the current recovery: Manufacturing, Retail Trade, and Wholesale Trade.  These are the three that represent basic total spending.  Retail and wholesale trade are driven by total consumer spending. Period. Retail and wholesale also are very flexible without widespread specialized skills requirements.  When demand exists, they hire. When demand doesn’t exist they don’t hire and may layoff.  To me, the data indicates it’s clearly a lack of demand story that is hurting jobs in this so-called recovery. Reducing government employment right now, like this graph shows is being done, has repercussions in stopping employment growth in retail, wholesale, and manufacturing.

In Michigan, Governor Snyder Is Increasing Unemployment

/ Jim Luke / 3 Comments

For years and through the early part of the Great Recession of 2007-09, Michigan was ground zero for unemployment. Unemployment rates of around 15% – worst in the nation.  But once the GM and Chrysler completed their bankruptcies, it has begun to emerge. In the past 12 months Michigan has made relatively good progress on it’s unemployment problem.  In fact, it’s made the most progress of any state (a low bar, I know) while some states like Nevada and California and two other states are worse.  To the extent a governor is responsible for unemployment in the state, this must be accredited to Jennifer Granholm who left office in January 2011.

The new governor, Rick Snyder, came in full of Republican talk and promise of “creating good jobs”.  He’s been extremely vague about this happens other than to wave the magic business tax-cut genie.  Apparently, according to Snyder, if we simple cut business taxes by raising taxes on seniors and poor people, then the jobs will just happen.  Now there’s plenty of evidence indicating this idea simply doesn’t work.  Taxes are not the major reason why businesses are where they are.  More importantly, no business ever said “hey, my taxes were cut so I’ll be a good citizen and hire somebody”.  What real businesses do is they say “hey, there’s demand for my product, I better hire somebody”.

Unfortunately Snyder is not content to simply cut business taxes.  He has to tinker with a proven job-creation system based on tax credits for the film industry.  How this tax credits for a film industry are different from general business tax cuts is because they are focused on creating the initial infrastructure or economic “eco-system” that causes a significant industry to concentrated in one area.  Creating the basic infrastructure and network of start-up firms concentrated in a particular industry is critical.  It’s how giant industries grow.  It’s the dynamic that created Silicon Valley.  Heck, it’s the dyanamic that created Detroit and Michigan as the center of the auto industry 100 years ago.

We’re backtracking now.  From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110511/BIZ/105110359/Michigan’s-film-studios-go-to-fade-out#ixzz1M6IMlJeh

Michigan’s fledgling film studio infrastructure is crumbling as the number of productions declines in the wake of a $25 million limit on state cash incentives for movies, television shows and digital media.

Livonia-based Maxsar Digital Studios, which opened a week before Gov. Rick Snyder announced in mid-February that he wanted to cut and cap the nation’s most generous film and television industry tax incentives, has laid off its 50 employees and idled all productions.

A west Michigan facility known as 10 West Studio has lost two potential film deals, and one of its principal founders has relocated to Los Angeles.

Another studio operated by S3 Entertainment Group in Ferndale was evicted from a Madison Heights location earlier this year for failure to pay rent.

“We don’t have a sufficient industry to support an infrastructure at the $25 million cap,” said Jeff Spilman, founder and managing director of S3 Entertainment Group, referring to Snyder’s plan, which the state Film Office has adopted but the Legislature has yet to approve.

“Everyone who has had the capacity to leave has pretty much left,” Spilman said.

Having government plant the seeds, build the infrastructure, or even fund a young industry is an old and proven tactic for industrial growth.  It worked for railroads, the telegraph, electricity, computers, software, airlines, aircraft, pharmaceuticals, and many others.  Snyder is abandoning what’s proven to work for a magical belief in a genie.

I still expect some gradual improvement in Michigan unemployment, but that’s largely because our good old standby, the auto industry, is recovering and gaining ground.  Unfortunately that leaves Michigan just as dependent on one industry as we were before.

Aftershocks: Prepare for the Slowdown

/ Jim Luke / 2 Comments

I’m back from the Higher Learning Commission conference in Chicago, which is why postings have been sparse.  I probably won’t get really back up to speed on postings for yet another few days because I’ve teaching, grading, and taxes to do.

In Japan, the aftershocks continue from the massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami.  The global economy is beginning to experience aftershocks from the triple disaster (quake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown) as well.  As readers might remember, I pointed out last month that the disaster would prove to be the first real large scale “stress test” of the concept of globalization in manufacturing.  The initial expectation of economists after the disaster was that it would prove a challenge and shock to the Japanese economy but that there really wouldn’t be much impact outside of Japan.  Now we are starting to see that this initial reaction was wrong.  We are starting to see aftershocks in the global economy.

The news for the last two weeks in the global auto industry has been about supply-chain interruptions and temporary plant closures. For example Forbes reports today on Toyota’s announcement:

Toyota Motor Corp. said today it is going to halt production in Europe for eight days due to parts supply shortages resulting from Marchs earthquake and tsunami.

The shutdowns will take place from April 21 to May 2.

Assembly plants in the U.K., France and Turkey will be impacted as well as engine manufacturing facilities in the U.K. and Poland.

The plants will then run at a limited capacity.

This is on top of earlier announcements of rolling temporary shutdowns at U.S. plants and the continued shutdown or slowed production at it’s Japan plants.  Other news reports today have Toyota advising U.S. dealers that there will likely be shortages of some models at showrooms this summer.  Other reports.

You can’t sell cars you don’t have and haven’t built.  And you can’t build cars without all the parts – less than 100% of the parts is just not enough. Phillipines, Japan, Turkey, France, U.S., Germany, Britain.  This is global. And it’s not just one company. It’s across the industry since most firms had all adopted the same globalized supply chain strategy built around single sources for key parts.

It’s also not just the auto industry. The Wall Street Journal reports how electronics manufacturers are being affected:

Over the weekend, the Nikkei reported that Sharp halted LCD panel production at its Kameyama plant in Mie Prefecture, western Japan, and at its Sakai plant in Osaka until after the Golden Week holiday season in early May. The paper cited disruptions to industrial gas supplies and said the company expects to secure more gas in about a month…

Sony said Friday it is suspending operations at its optical parts and IC cards plant in Miyagi prefecture in northeastern Japan, following a power outage caused by the biggest aftershock to hit the area late Thursday.

A Sony spokeswoman said the plant will resume operations as soon as the power supply has been restored.

“Electronics makers and auto makers are extremely sensitive to further damages as it is becoming increasingly unclear how soon companies can resume full production,” Watanabe said.

I think it’s safe now to say that Japanese earthquake-driven interruptions to supply chains are more than just a “risk” to the global economic performance. We should consider the interruptions and concomitant plant shutdowns as a factor currently slowing economic growth.  At this time, the big question is just how much they will slow growth and even potentially reduce employment.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have no great (or little) econometric model that I use.  I just go on my intuition.  Right now, I’m thinking the supply chain interruptions reduce GDP growth in the U.S. in second and third quarter 2011 by maybe 0.2-0.3 percentage points.  That’s not much. And in normal times it could be easily absorbed.  But this is not normal times.  We only grew at 2.9% in 4Q 2010.  We won’t know 1Q 2011 growth for another two weeks, but estimates are running lower – in the 1.5 to 2.5% range.  We need growth above 4% if we are to make serious inroads on re-hiring the nearly 20 million unemployed people, so, yes, this hurts.

And, like all aftershocks, this one is not isolated. There’s other aftershocks starting to hit our economy. Aftershocks from misguided budget deals and misguided European monetary policy.  I’ll talk more about those as I get time. Unlike GE, I have to pay my taxes this weekend.

The GM Tale

/ Jim Luke / 3 Comments

Earlier this week General Motors, the new post-bankruptcy GM, issued it’s Initial Public Offering.  Initial signs are very encouraging in several ways, which I’ll describe.  But first let’s take  a note.  Only 20 months, less than two years, The conservatives and tea party types were howling for GM to go bankrupt and for the government to not step in – just let it and Chrysler die along with what would probably have been nearly a million good U.S. jobs and the State of Michigan. Let’s revisit those events for a moment below the fold:

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