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Keep costumes out, keep trains in: defining and defending spaces for “good jobs” in a Rust Belt city

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Abstract

The re-industrialization of brownfields has become an important economic redevelopment strategy in many “Rust Belt” cities, and labor-community coalitions have sought to ensure that such projects bring economic justice through good jobs to inner-city neighborhoods with high rates of unemployment. These coalitions have in many cases succeeded in establishing geographically defined job standards, such as living wage ordinances and community benefits agreements, but few studies have investigated how such “spatial fixes for labor” influence or fail to influence the relocation and investment decisions of firms. In this article, we compare and contrast two efforts to define and defend inner-city brownfields redevelopment projects as spaces for good local jobs in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We find that the influence of spatially defined job standards on relocation decisions varied with the different scales of political engagement and economic mobility involved in each case. In addition, we identify a common political factor in these decisions that previous research in labor geographies has not emphasized: the discursive trivialization of a firm’s primary product. In combination, the two cases suggest that future geographic research on economic justice and the agency of labor and its allies needs to attend both to the complex scalar dimensions of geographically defined job standards and to the roles of nonhuman products in political controversies over redevelopment.

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Notes

  1. In 2007, in the City of Milwaukee manufacturing employment was second highest after the health care and social assistance sector. In the Milwaukee metro area, however, manufacturing provided most employment, followed by the health care and social assistance sector (Rast 2010).

  2. The era of Socialist governments in Milwaukee ended in 1960 when Mayor Frank Zeidler ended his third term and was succeeded by Henry Maier, a Democrat.

  3. Estimated public investment since 1998 is $148 million (Menomonee Valley Partners 2008).

  4. 92% of the Milwaukee metro area’s African-American labor force lives in the city, and 79 % of the metro’s white labor force lives in the suburbs (Levine 2003). Most residents reliant on bus transportation remain concentrated in the central city, with African-Americans representing the largest share (49.4 %) among the city’s bus commuters (Rast 2004).

  5. Yet Palermo’s workers recently engaged in a well-publicized effort to form a union in response to low-wages and poor working conditions (Kaufmann 2012).

  6. Similar divided positions on providing “good jobs” arose around Harley Davidson’s plan to build a museum in the Valley. MVP/SSCHC opponents of the plan characterized DCD’s approval as a lost opportunity and a “huge land grab” since the museum would create only a “few lower-paying jobs,” instead of creating employment for “400 people that make $18/per hour” (Former Director, MVP, July 2008).

  7. Governor Thompson’s task force framed the rail system as “vital” for the twenty-first century, and as a “catalyst” for economic growth and “family sustaining” jobs (Wisconsin Department of Transportation 2001: 5, 14).

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Acknowledgments

The research upon which this article is based was funded by the 2007 Association of American Geographers Urban Geography Specialty Group Dissertation Fellowship. We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their insights, and also Robert Lake for his comments on an earlier draft which was presented at the 2012 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in New York. All arguments and conclusions are entirely the responsibility of the authors.

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  1. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Ryan Holifield

  2. University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Sandra Zupan

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Correspondence to Ryan Holifield.

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Holifield, R., Zupan, S. Keep costumes out, keep trains in: defining and defending spaces for “good jobs” in a Rust Belt city. GeoJournal 79, 309–328 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9495-9

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