While the car companies have donated millions to Detroit and its community groups to ease their financial pain, city officials and industry executives realize that the Big Three can no longer provide what Detroit really needs: more good-paying jobs, the New York Times reported today. In the 1960s, the auto companies and their suppliers generated an estimated 300,000 jobs in the city. Now the number has shrunk to less than one-tenth of that, and auto jobs are continuing to disappear. Last year American Axle and Manufacturing, a major supplier to General Motors, closed an ’80s factory complex that as recently as 2007 had 2,200 workers. The company transferred the work to a lower-cost plant in Mexico, and now plans to demolish its Detroit site.
