My wife is working on a college paper about Detroit and its population decline, and though she (and now I) can find many stats regarding Detroit’s peak population, the auto workers’ average wages, etc., she can’t find anything on what percentage of Detroit’s population was employed by the auto industry at its peak. Any help?
I’m not going to do all of the research, but some helpful hints (and questions) for doing it yourselves:
[ul]
[li]Do you mean Detroit proper? There’s all of southeast Michigan in general. There are probably more employees that live in cities outside of Detroit than in Detroit proper.[/li][li]What’s “the auto industry”? Directly for the OEM’s? What about suppliers? What about suppliers’ suppliers? The auto industry is friggin’ huge, and the percentage of people that work directly for an OEM is surprisingly small.[/li][li]You should be able to find the number of employees that worked for each OEM for most years. Usually those are global numbers, though.[/li][li]Try looking for the history of specific plants in Detroit. They’ll often have the number of employees for certain years.[/li][li]And of course Detroit’s historical population should be easy to find.[/li][/ul]
Have her publish her results online so someone else can find them in the future! It’ll be interesting data.