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Minding our own business for December 24, 2005 Linda Hirvonen, Delta County EDA MSU-E and a downstate group MRG both did surveys of Michiganders attitudes about the economy in the past several months. Both surveys, MRG across the state and MSU-E in UP only, found that the majority felt that they were not better off than they were in 2000 and don’t expect it to change much in the next several years. In the MSU-E study, only 4.52% of Delta County respondents felt they were better off than 4-5 years ago, and only 7.15% felt they would be better off 4-5 years from now. Yet there were only four counties more positive about their current situation. Marquette County residents were the most optimistic, followed by Keweenaw, Houghton, and Dickinson (who were less optimistic about the future than Delta). Public sentiment and the facts are often at odds due to a number of factors. These may be when personal experience gets generalized too far to become a universal truth in some circles, or there may be emotional residual effects of circumstances in other areas that we transfer to our own mindset. This seems to be the case for the past year when it comes to people’s perception of the economy. The State has faced some rather dire situations, and public monies that we have come to expect are no longer a given. Layoffs and unemployment and earthly disasters in several sections of the country make the news, and we tend to forget that in the UP we are a bit insulated. This is both good –we don’t hit the lows of others- and bad- we don’t see the highs either. But if readers will step back and think about how optimistic they felt about the economy in 2000 vs now, perhaps they should also think about what it is that makes them feel less optimistic now Let’s look at the employment in Delta County over the past ten years. 2004 was a positive year for us, and 2005 looks pretty great based on the number of people employed. October is the last data available.  Usually when people talk about the employment situation, they look at the percent unemployed (see right side of chart below for scale of unemployment line). This number only makes sense, however, if the number of people in the workforce is also compared. Here’s how our employment looks versus our workforce. We have more people in the workforce, which is good since we haven’t grown in population, so maybe we have more people staying. Note how we have 1,000 more people employed than we did a year ago and 3,000 more than in 1995. In October, we had fewer than 1,000 people unemployed in the whole county.  What I see over the last 18 months from talking with industry is very different from the general pessimism I hear. Area companies have been investing in equipment, tooling, and employee training. They have been developing new products and taking them to market. They have been adding employees. The best of them have also been changing the way they do business to remain competitive in the new global realities. Diversification of products, diversification of customers, bidding lots of small jobs instead of being able to operate with a few large customers, reduction of number of parts or items kept in inventory, and re-evaluation of the costs of doing business are all ways Delta County businesses are staying competitive. |
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