Grinding Decline in Springfield: Is the Finance Control Board the Answer?

Springfield, Massachusetts, the Bay State’s third largest city, suffered staggering manufacturing job loss over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. In 2004, the financial impact of job loss, coupled with dubious fiscal management, plunged the city into near bankruptcy. In response, state government passed legislation appointing a Finance Control Board to manage city business. Wage freezes for City workers were continued and cuts in numerous essential services occurred to deal with the debt. But the question remains, can a Control Board approach grow a large stock of well-paying jobs — large enough to grow the city’s and the Connecticut River Valley’s economies? This article originally appeared in a 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 20, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol20/iss2. For this reprint, the author has prepared an update, which is included after the conclusion of the original article

Review of \u3cem\u3eStayin\u27 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.\u3c/em\u3e Jefferson Cowie. Reviewed by Robert Forrant.

Book review of Jefferson Cowie, Stayin\u27 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. The New Press (2010). $21.95 (paperback)

The MechTech Program: An Education and Training Model for the Next Century

The small-firm metalworking industry is routinely characterized by cutthroat competition and fierce privacy. Yet, since the late 1980s, the members of the western Massachusetts chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Association have participated in an education, training, and technology diffusion network characterized by a high degree of interfirm cooperation. Hundreds of workers and managers have take part in group training sessions and seminars. The reconstruction of the skill base is central to the MechTech apprenticeship program through which apprentices spend four years in participating firms, exiting the program as licensed machinists, tool and die makers, or moldmakers. In an important break with the typical short-term and firm-specific training approaches of American industry, apprentices rotate among several firms engaged in various aspects of metalworking to receive a comprehensive education. They also join a two-year college program and receive a degree in manufacturing technologies. The costs of the plan, including the college degree, are borne almost entirely by the participating firms. This article describes briefly the evolution of the entire western Massachusetts metalworking training program and in some detail how MechTech functions, concluding with a discussion of the program\u27s implications for policymakers

Review of \u3cem\u3eUnsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto\u3c/em\u3e. Eric Tang. Reviewed by Robert Forrant

Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. Temple University Press, (2015), 220 pages, $24.95 (paperback);$70 (hardcover)

Review of \u3cem\u3eRace, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.\u3c/em\u3e Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright, Eds. Reviewed by Robert Forrant.

Book review of Robert Bullard & Beverly Wright, Eds., Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Westview Press, 2009. $32.00 paperback

Grinding Decline in Springfield: Is the Finance Control Board the Answer?

Springfield, Massachusetts, the Bay State’s third largest city, suffered staggering manufacturing job loss over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. In 2004, the financial impact of job loss, coupled with dubious fiscal management, plunged the city into near bankruptcy. In response, state government passed legislation appointing a Finance Control Board to manage city business. Wage freezes for City workers were continued and cuts in numerous essential services occurred to deal with the debt. But the question remains, can a Control Board approach grow a large stock of well-paying jobs — large enough to grow the city’s and the Connecticut River Valley’s economies

Skill was never enough : American Bosch, Local 206 and the decline of metalworking in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1900-1970.

From the early nineteenth century through World War II Springfield, Massachusetts was one of the world\u27s preeminent metalworking centers. On the eve of the Second World War hundreds of firms and thousands of skilled machinists produced machine tools, fixtures, castings, forgings, and precision components for the nation\u27s automobile, electrical appliance, steel, and aircraft industries. However, by the mid-1950s Springfield industry commenced an inexorable decline, interrupted briefly by Vietnam War defense spending. Firms were purchased by outside investors and work moved, while foreign firms gained market share from local companies. Springfield\u27s fall from manufacturing prominence mirrors events elsewhere in the industrial Northeast and is important to understand. The decline is examined mainly through a history of the American Bosch Company, its workers, and their union. Established in 1911, unionized in 1936, Bosch specialized in the design and manufacture of precision diesel fuel injections components. During World War II it employed thousands of skilled machinists. After the war it was purchased by Wall Street investors and in the early 1950s became part of a small corporation headquartered in New York City. By the early 1960s it had become the most profitable firm in the diesel products division of a Fortune 500 corporation. By the time it closed in 1986 Bosch was an aging plant with a few hundred workers owned by a Fortune 100 corporation. From 1950 forward management attempted to implement numerous strategies to reduce costs and maintain market share, including the construction of a low-wage plant in Mississippi, the acquisition of overseas factories, and in-plant schemes to streamline production. The union resisted in-plant restructuring efforts, but offered token opposition to the company\u27s world-wide maneuvers. Throughout, unionists believed their machining skills coupled with their knowledge of the products being produced were assets the company needed to succeed. The company never shared this perspective, and unresolved, this disjuncture contributed to the closing of the plant. It is argued here that management\u27s efforts failed because workers were treated as appendages of their machines

Community-University Partnerships: Achieving continuity in the face of change

A challenge most community-university partnerships will face after having established themselves is how to maintain continuity in the face of change. The problems besetting communities continually shift as new issues bubble up. Similarly, the goals of the university partners often fluctuate. And the partners themselves shift: people working in non-government organizations often move in and out of positions and university partners may change with tenure or shifts in university priorities. In light of all of this flux, can stable community-university partnerships be built and, if so, how

Community-University Partnerships: Achieving continuity in the face of change

A challenge that community-university partnerships everywhere will face is how to maintain continuity in the face of change. The problems besetting communities continually shift and the goals of the university partners often fluctuate. This article describes a decade-long strategy one university has successfully used to address this problem. Over the past ten years, a community-university partnership at the University of Massachusetts Lowell has used summer content funding to respond creativity to shifting priorities. Each summer a research-action project is developed that targets a different content issue that has emerged with unexpected urgency. Teams of graduate students and high school students are charged with investigating this issue under the auspices of the partnership. These highly varied topics have included immigrant businesses, youth asset mapping, women owned businesses, the housing crisis, social program cutbacks, sustainability, and economic development and the arts. Despite their obvious differences, these topics share underlying features that further partnership commitment and continuity. Each has an urgency: the information is needed quickly, often because some immediate policy change is under consideration. Each topic has the advantage of drawing on multiple domains: the topics are inherently interdisciplinary and because they do not “belong” to any single field, they lend themselves to disciplines pooling their efforts to achieve greater understanding. Each also has high visibility: their salience has meant that people were often willing to devote scarce resources to the issues and also that media attention could easily be gained to highlight the advantages of students, partners, and the university working together. And the topics themselves are generative: they have the potential to contribute in many different ways to teaching, research, and outreach. This paper ends with a broader consideration of how partnerships can implement this model for establishing continuity in the face of rapidly shifting priorities and needs