Detroit shines bright on national stage

Brighter vision of Detroit shines on national TV November 13, 2007 By TOM WALSH FREE PRESS COLUMNIST NBC-TV news anchor Brian Williams and sister station CNBC made one of their infrequent forays to Detroit on Tuesday to give the nation’s viewers a glimpse of the bleak, battered industrial heartland. What they saw was a bit different. Their cameras were set up inside the Warren Truck plant of the suddenly lean and lively Chrysler LLC, whose new superstar executive, Jim Press, was interviewed by Williams. “This is an opportunity to realize the American Dream, a chance to see American industry come back,” Press said of Chrysler’s new life under private equity ownership.Detroit’s newspapers screamed of good news for the long-derided city center: “QUICKEN TO BRING HQ, 4,000 WORKERS DOWNTOWN” was the headline on the Free Press that CNBC anchor Erin Burnett held up at the start of her 2 p.m. “Street Signs” business program.The overall thrust was decidedly “Detroit, sunny-side up.”Even the mid-November Michigan weather outside was sunny and bright. Go figure.Burnett’s producer juggled her guest lineup Tuesday to squeeze a remote interview of Quicken founder Dan Gilbert in between on-set chats with investment manager David Sowerby, Masco Corp. Chairman Richard Manoogian and Chris Ilitch, chief executive officer of the Ilitch family pizza, sports and entertainment empire. “There’s a gritty resolve among the leaders in this community to reinvent itself, to build on the old automotive manufacturing model and add to it,” said Chris Ilitch, who was interviewed by CNBC after joining his father, Mike, at the celebration of Quicken’s commitment to move downtown.Gilbert is pushing the tagline Detroit 2.0 to describe the next generation of business growth, moving the region beyond the Detroit 1.0 industrial world with a high-tech cluster of new companies and young workers moving into the city center. Quicken Loans is the nation’s largest Internet mortgage lender, with most of its 4,000 employees in Michigan.When CNBC’s Burnett interviewed Frank Ewasyshyn, Chrysler’s executive vice president of manufacturing, she rattled off grim statistics, such as Chrysler cutting 23,000 jobs. To which Ewasyshyn matter-of-factly replied that today’s Chrysler, unlike past regimes, won’t keep producing slow-selling vehicles and dumping them onto dealer lots. “We have to react to the marketplace,” he said, referring to a cutback from three shifts to two at Warren Truck.He said Chrysler is pleased with the flexibility its new UAW contract, which provides a two-tier wage for new hires, allowing the company to pay a lower wage to about 15% of its workers in a typical assembly plant who do noncore jobs not directly tied to building vehicles.Manoogian told me after his CNBC interview that Michigan and Detroit are now facing up to the reality that today is not like the old days, when a cyclical automotive downturn would be followed by a surge of growth and hiring. “This downsizing is more permanent,” he said, “and our challenge is to take that talented pool of people into alternative energy, life sciences and other growing fields.”No one should think that Michigan’s difficult days are over, just because Quicken is shifting a few thousand jobs from Livonia to Detroit, or because the sun shined on a November day when NBC and CNBC were filming here.The sunny side of the talk Tuesday is that it was grounded in a reality about what Detroit is and still can be, rather than more whining about what used to be, what will never be again and who’s to blame.