I worked in the automotive indusry for many years and IMO the biggest cause of the decline in this industry can be traced to organized labor primarily in the form on the UAW.
I mentioned briefly the outlandish contractural agreements reached in a earlier post but I'll just cite one example. This was called Layoff in Lieu of Transfer(LLT)** if your position was eliminated and you were for example a Grade 10. You could "bump" into (as I remember it) another Grade 10 position based upon senority. If this wasn't possible you could take a layoff for up to a year at 95% of your salary.
This an a host of other union concessions led to a reluctance on the part of investors to provide funding to update and improve automotive manufacturing which let to declines in quality compared to foreign competition. The assembly lines which were already out of date began to decline further. We had a group at IH whose sole responsiblity was to outsource components as they could be purchased less expensively than the could be built in house and at equal or higher quality.
When a like product can be built elsewhere at a lower cost and with better quality it doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out the end result. When I was at IH engineering management randomly pulled an assembled vehicle out of the recently built and, as I remember it, found over 100 flaws due to shoddy manufacturing.
The Japanese were routinely kicking butt back then and this has increased.
Good paying American jobs in manufacturing are IMO gone for good. The American unionized workers with a lot of help from Unions like the UAW and socialist politicians priced themselves right out of the market.
Jim
**My information is dated and this may not be the case anymore. However; I don't remember the unions ever giving anything substantial back.
Last edited by James M; 05/29/15 08:09 PM.
