“Manufacturing is gone,” Mayor Daley blurted out last year as he plumped for his casino project. The abandoned factory hulks and weedy lots where tens of thousands of blue-collared men and women once worked for companies like U.S. Steel, Wisconsin Steel, Western Electric, Schwinn, and Stewart-Warner reinforce Daley’s image of decline. So do the statistics: Chicago lost half its manufacturing employment from 1975 to 1992, about 190,000 jobs.
The tendency of American businesses to shift manufacturing overseas, to act simply as marketers of foreign-made goods, or to play financial manipulators to the world is dangerously delusive. “If we don’t develop and create new products, we lose the market–period,” argues Tom Kaiser, president of P-K Tool, a small west-side fabricator of precision metal parts. “Anyone who is smart enough to build their own televisions and cars can provide their own insurance and beverage supplies.” Think of the rapid progression of Japan from low-wage, low-quality manufacturer to efficient producer of sophisticated electronics and machine tools and then to world financier and owner of leading United States entertainment companies–MCA, Columbia–while retaining its industrial prowess.
There’s a slight swing back to recognizing the importance of manufacturing. The Clinton administration is expected to promote ideas such as “the high-performance workplace” (featured in a recent Chicago conference), technical assistance to manufacturing, and a more aggressive trade and industrial policy (although little of that is evident so far). Without stronger and more helpful federal action, there are limits to what Chicago or Illinois governments can do.
Limiting the effectiveness of the PMDs is the speculation of some developers that the city eventually will bend the rules. This speculation has kept land prices high. While Planning and Development officials have given mixed signals, commissioner Valerie Jarrett insists, “We have not wavered. We are more convinced than ever” that the PMDs make sense.
Ironically, given the empty land and vacant buildings around Chicago, CANDO business retention and development groups have long complained that the city loses many growing manufacturers because they can’t find adequate intermediate-size factory space. “The city has done a really poor job of bringing companies to sites or marketing the industrial potential of sites in and outside the [industrial] corridors,” says Michael Holzer, director of industrial retention at the New City YMCA/Local Economic & Employment Development Council near the Clybourn industrial corridor. “We’ve got companies along the Elston PMD that regularly get calls and personal visits from Kenosha, Racine, and other places with offers of packages to relocate. I’m not saying the city should try to steal other companies, but it should market sites it has.”
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Manufacturing has its troubles throughout metropolitan Chicago but most of all in the city proper, the oldest area and the one most plagued with social problems. Industrial employment has remained fairly stable over the last decade in suburban Cook County and has grown in most of the collar counties. Any manufacturing strategy for Chicago should link up with the rest of the metropolitan region. Yet until there is some sound basis for cooperating with suburbs that have thrived in part by draining Chicago of factories and jobs, the city also will have to act in its own parochial interests.
