Over the decades, we have witnessed the deindustrialization of the Northeast and what has become known as Rust Belt states. Some of the migration of businesses and people has been to the Sun Belt states, and more recently outside of the country. A number of explanations have been offered for the shift to the south. They include: a desire for higher productivity; better amenities; and more affordable housing. Other explanations are more blunt: a desire to escape legacy costs; the ability to start anew in right to work states; and a search for more favorable tax policies and rates. That may have helped explain the shift south, but it doesn’t explain the shift outside this country that is more related to cheap labor; a shifting in growth markets; and better logistical systems.

The results are the same: better paying jobs have been lost, as the economy has shifted from producing to services and consumption. As businesses and people have migrated, they have left communities that have inadequate tax bases and high unemployment and underemployment rates with little protects of turning this around. Where these conditions exist, citizens will suffer.

In order to address this chronic and worsening problem, we have to find ways to generate more value in the economy, and as President Obama suggested in his State of the Union address, produce more. This requires a fundamental rethinking of major policies: we need a practical energy plan which realistically bridges the shift from fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy, none exists today. We need a willingness to utilize our own natural resources.

We need to break through the barriers that make it virtually impossible to permit new facilities in reasonable amounts of time. We tax policies that are competitive on a worldwide basis and attract new businesses rather than encouraging them to flee to other areas. A weak dollar while providing short-term benefits is in a sense one of the most insidious taxes of all: it ultimately fuels inflation first through commodities and ultimately reduces disposable income for all, especially those who have little. This means putting in place fiscal and monetary policies that make longer-term sense.

We need a willingness to explore alternative approaches to doing work that empowers workers rather than shackles them, as is currently the case in the many traditional locations.

In the 1950s, Eric Trist and Fred Emery developed their sociotechnical-systems approach at the Tavistock Institute in London. Their concept was that things get done more effectively when social and technical systems are jointly optimized; and they found that teams in self-managed work teams in “high-commitment or high-performance” organizations best do this. I’ve seen this work in both union facilities and non-union facilities, although it is much easier and faster to get done in non-union facilities. One that I am familiar with breathed life back into a community that lost economic hope; and it became one of the safest, highest quality and most productive facilities of its type.

A worker who participated in a redesign effort offered this observation to me, “I used to dread getting up in the morning and having to go to work, and now I can’t wait to jump out of bed to go to work.” In these types of environments some of the most innovative and well-paying compensation systems have been developed and are used.

If we want to address the root causes of problems that Jeff raised, I think that we need to become engaged and seek better policies that actually will give communities a chance to rise from the ashes. It isn’t easy, but is can be done, but it will take time and a willingness to abandon preconceptions and implement pragmatic solutions. Many of the concerns that we have about race and class are addressed as significant value is generated in the economy on a sustainable basis. Without this type of economic revival, resources will not be available for the most vulnerable and at risk; and the enormity of our unfunded liabilities and cumulative debt will overwhelm efforts to deal with our concerns.