Channing Kennedy

Seth Wessler at HuffPo: GM’s Bankruptcy Hurts People of Color Hardest

Check out ARC researcher Seth Wessler’s excellent new piece at the Huffington Post today, “GM Bankruptcy Hurts People of Color Hardest. Workers Desperately Need EFCA.” Seth lays out how the real losers in GM’s bankruptcy are Detroit’s communities of color, who relied on the car industries union jobs to provide the few available living-wage jobs available. WIth those opportunities gone, the gulf between rich and poor widens and the space between unemployment and homelessness tightens.

From the article:

A few months ago, I traveled to Michigan to interview dozens of people for “Race and Recession,” a new report released by the Applied Research Center. I met Leo Shipman, a 24-year-old Black man, who had recently lost his job in an auto parts factory in Detroit. ‘My biggest worry is my son,’ he said about his 3-year-old. ‘You don’t know how you’re going to feed them. He doesn’t know the bills are running up, but I do.’ When I met Shipman, he was on the edge of being evicted from his apartment.

Read the rest of Seth’s article here.

Posted at 12:51 PM, Jun 04, 2009 in Race and Recession | Permalink | View Comments