The world gets clock-wise

Q: When is a nurse in a tunnel like a canary in a mineshaft?

A: When she's one of the hundreds of Canadian nurses who work every day in southeastern Michigan.

The long hours they've spent in recent weeks queued up to get through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel or across the Ambassador Bridge show how some fundamental assumptions about speed and efficiency in North America have been called into question since Sept. 11.

These nurses number more than 1,500. The hospitals of downtown Detroit, in particular, count on them to staff their emergency rooms, intensive-care units, and other facilities. They - and thousands of other daily transborder commuters - are the human faces of the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, that between the United States and Canada. It produces well over $1 billion in trade every day.

And that partnership in turn is only one part, albeit a huge one, of global trading systems built on assumptions of speed: easy border crossings, just-in-time deliveries, and shipment by air express of, it may seem, just about anything worth shipping.

All of those assumptions hit a major pothole after Sept. 11.

For nurses like Angela Lambing and Joyce Farrer, that's meant starting their commutes as early as 5 a.m. and even considering renting an apartment in Detroit during the week. For the business community, it's meant preparing to rethink their whole supply chains.

Not surprisingly, the post-attack crunch was felt early on at the border crossings between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, where the waits lasted up to 20 hours right after the terrorist attacks. And even with things back to "quote, normal," as one official puts it, the border communities are feeling the pinch of lost business and continued uncertainty. "We're the canary in the mineshaft," says Linda Smith of the Windsor and District Chamber of Commerce.

But technology got us into this mess, and most knowledgeable observers seem to feel that more technology will get us out: facial recognition technology to screen airport passengers, as is expected to be introduced in Boston within a few weeks; transponders on vehicles to transmit customs data ahead to border checkpoints; tracking systems that let shippers track packages in transit.

Technology has shrunk distance, and that has compressed time. And speed is where companies add value in the New Economy.

"Companies used to compete on price," says John Kasarda, director of the Kenan Institute for Free Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then came "Japanese management" and a focus on quality.

"But now it's speed and agility that determine the winners," he adds. And business competition isn't between companies anymore; it's between supply chains. "Speedy reliable delivery is a matter of value added, not just cost reduction."

Speed not only helps companies compete, it also creates opportunity for the labor force: What Dr. Kasarda and his colleague Jim Johnson describe as "speed-conscious jobs" could fill the same role in today's economy that low-skilled factory jobs used to play: They enabled a man without higher education to support a family. Today, says Dr. Johnson, "we're not going to compete on manufacturing in this country, we're going to compete on logistics."

Kasarda, an expert on aviation in economic development, has found that 42 percent of all world trade by value is shipped by air, compared with less than 2 percent of trade by weight.

"There are 314 border crossings involved in the assembly of a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer," he says.

In the weeks since Sept. 11, businesses have bounced back to "near normal," Kasarda says, even as they may be rethinking their production systems and supply chains. Companies may have to live with four-day lead delivery times instead of three days, he suggests.

"But no way will they go back to two weeks," as was common when manufacturers would stockpile parts for weeks before using them, he says.

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