Auto industry shouldn’t get a bailout

2 comments November 3rd, 2008

I’m keenly aware of what the U.S. auto industry has meant to the American economy for 100 years.

It’s hard to imagine, as we struggle through a crisis maybe 10 years in the making, that for more than a century, the U.S. auto industry and its attendant supplier companies have powered the American economy.

Then again, I’m a native of the auto industry’s hometown. There’s a lot of emotion tying me to the three companies that turned Detroit into Motown and the rest of the Rust Belt into a thriving, vibrant dynasty.

The jobs they provided my grandparents meant my parents enjoyed a lifestyle of which Grandma and Grandpa could only dream. Same for their grandchildren — one of whom my grandmother, in a fit of pique, actually called a “whippersnapper” (along with some other, more colorful names) the other day because I took a swing at some of the things she holds most dear.

I called modern labor unions an albatross around the neck of U.S. industry and the domestic auto industry’s placid arrogance a betrayal to every worker who ever sweated on a production line.

I felt wretched.

I had spoken treason against the First Family of American industry. But it’s true, and it’s why the Detroit Three don’t need a government bailout. Let them fail.

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the former Chrysler Corp. were the very heart of an economy and culture that nurtured and protected generations of American families. And the UAW was their lifeblood.

Had industry and union treated the relationship as a partnership, they might have stood a chance. But amid ever-present tension and thinly veiled mutual contempt, the state in which the companies find themselves today isn’t surprising. That the three enjoyed so many decades of success is.

They build vehicles few people want in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Neither side seemed to grasp the concept that a healthy company and healthy workers are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Now, all may be lost.

And the tragedy is that it has happened before, nearly 30 years ago. The economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a toxic mess for the Big Three; Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy and GM and Ford were in serious trouble.

They were obstinately churning out cars buyers didn’t want — but were profitable for the companies (like, say, SUVs) — and bloated union contracts were crippling them. Every suggestion, from management or union, was met with resistance from the other side. There was no chance for meaningful change.

Foreign automakers, who took advantage of the Big Three’s weakness 30 years ago to establish a toehold in the American market, are now thriving on American soil.

And companies who don’t learn, who expect different results every time they do the same thing over and over, probably shouldn’t be in charge of taxpayer dollars. And just because they’ve reached the end of their collective ropes doesn’t mean we should hang on with them.

The loss of one or both would be traumatic and painful, emotional and economically speaking.

But when all else fails, tough love has been known to work miracles on otherwise lost causes.