Business Strategy – Few places are more emblematic of the rise of American manufacturing, and its gradual decline, than this once-bustling industrial suburb of Dayton — within sight of the hill from which the Wright Brothers first tried to fly their innovative contraption, even before Kitty Hawk.
That was a century ago, and in time big stretches of the city were covered in factories. During World War I, more than 3,400 warplanes came off an assembly line in Moraine. The earliest electric refrigerators were mass-produced here, then cars and S.U.V.’s, and then suddenly very little.
In the weeks between Barack Obama’s election and his inauguration, General Motors closed the last big factory in Moraine, a four-million-square-foot plant that churned out S.U.V.’s. The 4,200 men and women who had worked there before the recession — representing nearly 2 percent of the work force in Moraine and the surrounding communities — lost their jobs and their wages, which were north of $20 an hour.
The president never sought to reopen the factory, even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in G.M. during the auto bailout. What he has done instead is try to ease some of the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve for the community’s wounds.
The ambassador, Edward B. Montgomery, executive director of the White House Council on Automotive Communities and Workers, has made 23 trips so far to troubled cities like Moraine. In lightning forays, he flies out of Washington in the morning, offers hope and aid, and returns to the capital in the evening. He concedes that he is not bringing jobs, but acting as a facilitator to help pummeled communities gain access to various government funds.
“The people are focused on how they can use their assets; they are not trying to capture G.M. coming back, but to go forward and build a new base,” Mr. Montgomery said in an interview after visiting Moraine last week.
During that visit, he told a gathering of local and state officials, “there may be some nontraditional, untapped sources of federal funds that we can help you tap.” He travels with an entourage of a dozen top officers from federal agencies, each with money to offer and an explanation of how to tap the funds. Read more »
