A different perspective on post-industrial labor market restructuring in Detroit and Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT

The Midwestern cities of Pittsburgh and Detroit are often held up as quintessential examples of post-industrial urban trajectories—one positive (Pittsburgh) and one negative (Detroit). In this paper, we investigate the structural economic shifts reshaping work opportunities in these two urban regions in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, using a shift share analysis of changes in occupational distributions from 2009 to 2016. Through this analysis, we identify comparable patterns in both cities, including the growth of creative workers across industries, and declining demand for service workers balanced only by growth in service-reliant industries. These findings add nuance to the prevailing narratives associated with Detroit and Pittsburgh, and demonstrate how structural forces intersect with understandings of “work” in these cities.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for very constructive feedback towards improving this paper. We are grateful to Shelley Smith for suggesting the shift share method, and Laura Gross, Blake Hill and Jason Harris for assistance with the syntax for this analysis. The authors presented portions of this research at the 2016 Urban Affairs Association and the 2017 Working-Class Studies Association annual meetings. The authors also thank Ryan Allen, Greg Schrock, Ric Kolenda, Matt Kaliner, Walter Carroll, and Doug Anderton for their input into early drafts. Colby King acknowledges Bridgewater State University’s Center for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship for funding to support this research, and thanks to the Massachusetts State College Association faculty union for their support and solidarity. Laura Crommelin acknowledges support from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that new narratives now show Detroit’s reputation improving, due to the resolution of municipal bankruptcy, and extensive corporate investment (see Eisinger, 2016; Reese et al., 2017). However, it remains unclear whether these uneven signs of recovery will shift perceptions of Detroit in the longer term.

2. ACS data were acquired through the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 8.0 (IPUMS) (Ruggles et al., 2018). The PERWT variable was used to weight our samples, to ensure the datasets are nationally representative for person-level analyses.

3. For MSAs, we used the MET2013 variable, which identifies metro areas of residence using the 2013 MSA definitions from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. The 2013 MSAs are the first to be based on 2010 standards and 2010 census data.

4. For comparison, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment estimates show Detroit MSA employment dropping precipitously from 1,927,781 in October 2008 to 1,807,855 in January 2009, to 1,741,229 in January 2011, before rebounding to 1,966,680 by May 2017. For Pittsburgh MSA, the BLS data shows a similar pattern, with a pre-recession peak of 1,176,301 in August 2008. This was followed by a rapid decline (1,138,092 in January 2009 and 1,073,238 in February 2010), then a rebound to 1,132,950 by May 2017. Overall the BLS employment estimates show a similar pattern to the ACS sample. While there are some differences between the two data sets, we find the ACS data useful for illustrating the underlying shifts in employment.

5. We re-created Florida’s occupational aggregations by following his aggregations for the super creative core, creative professionals, working class, service class, and agricultural class. The super creative core is a direct recoding of four of the major Standard Occupational Classification groups. The aggregation for creative professionals was more complicated because one group defined by Florida (high-end sales and sales management) includes only a few categories in sales, placing others sales categories in the service class, but Florida does not specify which groups he assigns to which class. We made an informed choice for recreating this class aggregation; for example, we included advertising and related sales jobs, but excluded cashiers.

6. As Reese, Faist, and Sands (2010) recognize, the literature provides several operationalizations of the creative class. Some focus on perceived characteristics of creative workers, such as tolerance and diversity, while others, like Florida’s, are based simply on the worker’s occupational category (Markusen et al., 2008).

7. In a paper comparing definitions of the working class, King (2019) aggregates all of the occupations Florida excludes from either creative class category as another way of counting the working class in the new economy. King (2019) labels that aggregation the “creative proletariat.”

8. A related but different shift share analysis has been used in regional economics and development studies to examine regional growth relative to the national context. As Haynes and Dinc (1997, p. 202) explain, in such studies employment is used “as a measure of economic performance for interregional comparison.” By contrast, we use employment as an indicator of the structural conditions experienced by workers in Detroit and Pittsburgh.

9. A program written in R was used to run the decomposition, and results spot-checked to ensure program accuracy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colby King

Colby King is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at USC-Upstate where he teaches and studies social class, stratification and inequality, urban sociology, sociology of work, and strategies for supporting working-class and first-generation college students. A regular contributor at the Everyday Sociology Blog, he is a member of the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on Working-Class and First-Generation Persons in Sociology and has served as a member of the Working-Class Studies Association’s Steering Committee. Colby co-created AudaCity, an educational board game for urban studies, with Matthew Cazessus, and, with Mark Gottdiener and Randy Hohle, he co-authored revisions for the 6th edition of The New Urban Sociology.

Laura Crommelin

Laura Crommelin is a Research Lecturer at the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, working on projects related to urban and housing policy, and teaches planning law in the Faculty of Built Environment’s City Planning program. Laura’s research interests cover a range of trends and issues in post-industrial cities, including urban renewal, urban governance, digital disruptions, place branding, and DIY urban revitalisation practices. Laura was the 2012–2013 Fulbright NSW Scholar, spending 8 months as a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan.