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- More importantly, what’s missing from this line of analysis is an acknowledgment of the structural shift in the global economy beginning in the 1960s and intensifying through the 70s and 80s. This brings us to a second approach to what’s happening in Flint, which frames the crisis through the lens of “disposability.” The deindustrialization of manufacturing cities like Flint and Detroit—first with suburbanization, relocating factories to segregated white suburbs, then with offshoring, relocating factories to other regions of the global economy—has had material impacts that are relatively insulated from political decision-making, especially at the city level. In Flint, notes historian Andrew Highsmith, GM’s workforce declined from more than 80,000 in 1955 to less than 8,000 by 2009 (pp. 2-5). As production was relocated and productivity increased, sectors of the working class have been rendered permanently superfluous to the needs of capital, and are expelled from the labor process, waged employment, and, increasingly, from what remains of the welfare state.