2010.1.10 – Jobs: A seismic shift creates a difficult new playing field
Asheville Citizen-Times editorial.
The past decade saw huge swings in where we work. In the Asheville metropolitan area from 2000 to 2009, a third of manufacturing jobs vanished, dropping from 27,300 workers to 18,100. On the flip side, employment in private educational and health services rose from 21,300 to 30,700. While the kinds of jobs changed, so did the kind of employer.
The age of the large employer is virtually gone; the Mission Health System, Ingles and Buncombe County Public Schools Education Services are the sole players left standing with 3,000-plus workers. In Buncombe County, nearly 11,000 businesses employ about 150,000 workers. Small business is more vital than ever.
There’s a tremendous opportunity for Asheville to become a focus in the green jobs field, with success stories like the rise of FLS Energy, an Asheville-based solar firm that’s grown from three employees in 2006 to 45 today and may double that figure in the next year. One analysis concludes the current climate and energy push could create 65,000 jobs in the state in the next decade, and with RENCI, NOAA and the National Climatic Data Center located in Asheville, climate science and attendant jobs are a natural fit here.
The challenge at hand is replacing stable, good-paying manufacturing jobs like the 200-plus recently lost at Volvo with something other than low-paying service or tourism jobs. Let’s not mince words regarding what’s at stake here: If we don’t have jobs paying a wage that can support a family, the character of WNC will be lost. Our communities — American society as we have known it — can’t function as a two-tiered system consisting essentially of servants and those being served.
We need our leaders to step it up on this front; we’ll end this with a query posed by blogger and former Citizen-Times local columnist Tom Sullivan, a professional engineer who usually lands work out of town, regarding the closing of Volvo: “Why do the people charged with attracting jobs still have theirs?”
It’s a hard question. The times call for asking them.
