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News Briefs

Date Posted: January 6 2006

U.S. money moves Flint labor museum
FLINT - The Labor Museum and Learning Center of Michigan received a congressional appropriation of $300,000 to pay for new exhibition space at the Sloan Museum.

Democratic Congressman Dale Kildee's funding request for the Flint labor museum was included in a federal bill on Nov. 18. The 1,000-square-foot exhibit will have the desk at which the agreement ending the 1936-37 Sit Down Strike was signed .

The Flint Sit-Down Strike lasted 44 days and would impact the course of the industrial labor movement forever, establishing the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative for GM employees.

The grant comes as a breath of fresh air for the museum's artifacts, which had been in mothballs since they were last shown at Mott Community College in 1998.

Kildee said the Labor Museum and Learning Center "will tell the story of a historic event in Flint that changed the lives of working Americans across this country."

The UAW said it would cost about $2 million to build a free-standing labor museum, which is the long-term goal.

State turnaround expected in '07
ANN ARBOR - The year 2006 will mark the sixth straight year of job losses in Michigan - a string unprecedented since World War II, University of Michigan economists said last month.

Over the past five years, Michigan's economy has lost a total of 308,900 jobs and will lose another 9,600 jobs in 2006. The state's manufacturing workforce has declined by about 25 percent during this time and will lose another 28,600 jobs in the next two years.

On the positive side, the private non-manufacturing sector, which lost 5,400 jobs last year, will add 4,400 new jobs in 2006 and 24,100 jobs in 2007, the forecast predicts. The service sector will show positive employment growth next year, while the trade, transportation and utilities sector are expected to turn around by mid-2006.

"We're not at the point of declaring that the Michigan economy has fallen into the fire, but we don't see it getting out of the frying pan soon, either," said U-M economist George Fulton. "Some progress has certainly been made since the large job dumps between 2000 and 2003. The losses have dwindled significantly since then, but they still persist."

In their annual forecast of the Michigan economy, Fulton and colleagues Joan Crary and Saul Hymans predict that the state will return to overall positive job growth in 2007, with 10,600 new jobs. However, compared with other years of job growth, this would rank as the weakest increase in the past 50 years, they say.

"Again, the chief culprit in the stagnant profile is the manufacturing sector," Crary said. "Manufacturing is forecast to sustain significant job losses over the next two years. This reflects our assumption of a continued loss of auto industry market share among the domestic producers, coupled with our forecast of fairly flat annual sales of light vehicles."