Photo of Mary Sheffield, current Detroit City Council president and probably the next mayor, overlaid with underscores, question marks and asterisks.
It seems a foregone conclusion that the next mayor of Detroit will be Mary Sheffield. The Democrat is currently a councilwoman representing Detroit’s City Council District 5, and also the president of that legislative body. Both mayor and councilmember are nonpartisan positions. The current mayor, Mike Duggan, is now running for governor as an independent.
Sheffield’s only opponent on the ballot for mayor, Rev. Kinloch, was such a distant second in the primary that it is plausible that Sheffield could win the general election even if Kinloch holds on to all of his primary voters.
Still, Sheffield runs ads on TVs. Ads in which she promises a Detroit in which “every resident can earn a higher living wage.” I guess “higher wage jobs” is just something you have to say to get elected, even if you have no specific ideas as to what kinds of jobs those would be.
What kinds of higher wage jobs can Detroiters get? Let’s talk about truck drivers. If you’ve never driven a truck, you probably at least have some idea of what it would take for you to become a professional truck driver. Even with the ill effects of the grand idiot’s tariffs, truck driving is still an attractive profession. The median salary of $53K is vastly preferable to the $28K median salary for fast food workers.
Apparently, Detroit at Work can send people to train at truck driving schools. It’s not exactly clear what Detroit at Work does. You might assume its stated goal is to get Detroiters into good paying jobs, but that’s just an assumption, presumably the assumption they want you to make. I asked Detroit at Work about truck driver training. They said yes, they do send Detroiters to truck driving school, but were very reluctant to elaborate for some strange reason.
Let’s give Detroit at Work the benefit of the doubt for the moment. If Detroit at Work uses Detroit taxpayer money to send people to truck driving school and most of those people graduate from the program, then the people who graduate from that program will get jobs driving trucks, right? Because that’s what we’re assuming since we’re giving Detroit at Work the benefit of the doubt.
Imagine that last year Detroit at Work sent a dozen Detroiters to a truck driving school. Imagine that eleven of them graduated, sometime in September of last year. I certainly wish all twelve of them had graduated, but this is a good result, right?
There was only one white man in the cohort, let’s call him “Jacob Wunschen.” By the middle of October of last year, Jacob started a job driving a truck mostly through southeastern Michigan, but sometimes also Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and occasionally Ontario. Now Jacob has logged 98,662 miles and zero accidents, but one parking ticket.
What about the ten other graduates? Turns out none of them have been able to find a truck driving job. “Janita Thompson” was told that she doesn’t understand shifting gears. Which suggests that maybe she should not have graduated, if she can’t understand such a foundational concept. “Deandre Watkins” has a felony conviction for drug possession with intent to distribute. These are both District 5 residents.
“Alfredo Gonzalez” (no relation to the Medal of Honor recipient) has gone to City Council and been very rude to the council members, including Sheffield. Surely he lacks soft skills, surely he talks to potential employers the exact same way he talks to negligent elected officials. Because don’t you talk to everyone the exact same way?
“Fabian Lopez” got into a minor accident in his personal vehicle, so understandably the truck companies are reluctant to give him a job driving one of their trucks.
“Jamarion Brooks Bryant” committed suicide, he got no sympathy from his own family, who all concluded that the reason he couldn’t get a truck driving job is because he’s just too lazy.
By the way, Jamarion, being a District 6 resident, was a constituent of Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero and he did try to talk to the councilwoman, but the councilwoman decided that Jamarion, being unable to contribute any money to her re-election campaign, was not worth talking to for even just a few seconds. Jamarion didn’t try talking to Sheffield, so don’t hold that against her.
Come on, can we speed this along? Can we find an excuse that covers all ten non-white graduates? Please, anything except that the truck companies are racist.
Well, tell you what, we’ll send the other six graduates to a second truck driving school to learn a different kind of truck, maybe the kind of truck they can actually get jobs driving. In which case, the question needs to be asked: why the damn hell did we not send them to that second truck driving school in the first place?
Was the first truck driving school legitimate? It must be, since Jacob Wunschen is now close to logging a hundred thousand miles, he should reach that milestone any day now. But is the school legitimate if it graduates people who can’t get jobs doing what they supposedly trained to do?
Maybe what I’ve described is not what actually happens with people who go to Detroit at Work hoping to start their truck driving careers. But it is very similar to what happens to people who go to Detroit at Work hoping to start their software developer careers.
I’ve been working on this analogy with the truck drivers because I believe almost everyone I talk to understands what a truck driver does even if he himself can’t drive a truck, whereas he might be rather clueless as to what it is that a software developer does even if he’s constantly scrolling on his phone.
When a white man wants to be a software developer, no one makes any excuses as to why he’s not good enough, no one invents any obstacles for him to overcome. He gets support and he gets to start his career, get laid off twice and keep going before deciding he’d rather be a professional skateboarder.
But people like Janita Thompson and Fabian Lopez get nothing but excuses. For example, Janita supposedly doesn’t understand For loops, even though she’s written them in JavaScript, Python, Swift and probably ten other programming languages that I don’t even know. Janita has graduated from five different training programs for software development, two of which the City of Detroit paid for. Doesn’t Mary Sheffield want to see some return on that investment?
And then there’s the general excuses for all these non-white graduates. Oh, layoffs! Oh, A.I.! Oh this, oh that.
The layoffs do happen. They’re a mechanism to maintain the racial purity of the profession. When you have a laid off white male programmer with a year of salaried experience and you have someone like Janita Thompson who has no salaried experience, who are you going to hire?
You go with Jacob Wunschen. Yeah, in this scenario, he graduated from Grand Circus a year ago, worked at Autonomic (a Ford subsidiary) for a year and he got laid off. But don’t feel bad for him, he’s got a job interview this week and three others next week. In the first scenario, you might have seen him backing a truck into a loading dock. In the second scenario, you don’t get to see what he did at Autonomic. Presumably he didn’t work on any vehicle firmware, but I can’t tell you that for sure.
If Detroit at Work dared treat a white man the way they’ve treated people like Janita Thompson and Fabian Lopez, Detroit at Work would be dismantled immediately. Detroit at Work needs to be dismantled and replaced with something that is directly accountable to Detroit’s elected officials, or better yet, Detroit’s job seekers.
If someone graduates from a training program paid for by the City of Detroit, then there needs to be a serious and honest effort to get that person into a relevant job within a short time of graduation. And if there’s any doubt that that person is unsuitable for the job he’s training for, then he shouldn’t graduate.
There needs to be an independent audit. How many people have ever gone to Detroit at Work looking for help getting training for software development? How many for job placement in that field? How many people have been placed in relevant jobs and what race are they? How many years have the people who haven’t been placed been trying for? These and many more questions need to be answered, and those answers need to be published.
Or if the purpose of Detroit at Work is merely to funnel money to training providers like Grand Circus, well, I suppose Detroit at Work is doing a bang-up job of that. But that needs to be disclosed, so that people understand that Detroit at Work is not about getting Detroiters jobs they want.
Maybe Mary Sheffield doesn’t care about the people getting hurt by Detroit at Work, at least she should care about the money being wasted on Detroit at Work.
