New Orleans Streetcar Art
There is never a good time to lose 5,000 jobs, but for Louisiana, the news that Northrop Grumman Corp. will close its Avondale shipyard (near New Orleans) could not have come at a worse time. Industries critical to the state’s economy – oil and gas, tourism, fishing – are devastated by the oil spill. Now with the closure of shipyards, the manufacturing industry comes under pressure as well. The 5,000 jobs to be eliminated include engineers, welders, pipefitters and other manufacturing positions that paid annual salaries of $62,000, on average. New Orleans is also facing hundreds of job eliminations at the Michoud Assembly Center, which employs workers from Lockheed Martin. The closures are the consequence of economic pressure for cost efficiency, unrelated to the oil spill. But the consequences are far-reaching as entire service industries support these facilities. In Lower Manhattan, we are all too familiar with this phenomenon: the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 resulted in substantial reductions in the New York banking workforce which, in turn, crippled small businesses that served those workers. You need only see the restaurant closings in the neighborhood to appreciate the ripple effect of the pain. And as we also know from our experience in New York, when a Fortune 500 company leaves, it typically transfers its financial support to other local charities in the communities where it maintains a presence. Reductions in the presence of Fortune 500 companies in New York impacted local charities that depended on those companies for grant support. What I find so upsetting about the experiences of communities facing disasters is that there appears to be no national learning taking place. We suffer needless pain, over and over again, as we experience the same losses from one community to the other. For a country with the diversity and richness of experience as ours, this is unacceptable.