EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
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Can Our Domestic Auto Industry Survive?
Hard to remember now, but eleven years ago, there was a very real possibility that the domestic auto industry might not survive. Both Chrysler and General Motors were in grave danger of falling into uncushioned bankruptcies that would have destroyed those companies, at least as we know them now.
Had that happened, their demise would have likely taken many suppliers with them, and that could have also taken down Ford. Had the worst happened, we might have been looking at a rerun of the Great Depression, at least in Michigan.
Of course, that wasn’t the way it turned out. Though Congress showed little inclination to help the auto industry, first the outgoing President, George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama committed billions to bail out the auto industry.
The result was, by nearly any measure, and enormous success. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are now alive, well, and rolling in profits, though Chrysler was essentially forced to become a subsidiary of Fiat as part of the deal.
But as we all know, this is not the auto industry of our youth. Far fewer people work on assembly lines. Most vehicles sold in the United States are not made by what we used to call the Big Three.
The vehicles we used to call “cars” — sedans – are almost an endangered species. The SUV is standard these days. Sixty-five percent of vehicles sold in the United States are made here. But many of those are made by transplants.
And it is no longer easy to say what a foreign car is. Is it a Chevy made in Mexico? Is it an Acura made in Ohio with 76 percent American parts?
When it comes to autoworkers, the world is also different, and getting more so. Back in the days of Walter Reuther and Doug Fraser, the United Auto Workers was known as the cleanest and most incorruptible union around.
Now, the UAW is mired in a terrific and far-reaching scandal that may result in some of the union’s top leaders going to prison. This comes after years that have seen the UAW membership shrink by almost three-fourths, and the union’s repeated failure to organize factories not owned by the Detroit Three.
Add to this the phenomenal growth of driverless and electric cars and the coming world of vehicles that drive themselves, and it is clear that the auto industry of 2049 may be as different from today as ours is from 1979.
But Metropolitan Detroit is the place that put the world on wheels. Sometimes I eat lunch in a Coney Island started by a former Model T assembly line worker in a building that stands almost in the shadow of Henry Ford’s now deserted old plant, a place that transformed the 20th century.
This city grew up with and around the auto industry. I don’t see our rendezvous with each other, and with destiny, ending any time soon.
