Sandy Munro and his Dad worked in the US Car industry inside and outside of the UAW. Sandy explains that making the US car industry less competitive contributed to the General Motors shrinking from over 50% market share to less than 16%. The UAW auto industry members shrank from 1.5 million in 1979 to 180,000 car industry members today. There are about 350,000 UAW members but about half are in farming and other industries.
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It’s entirely U.S. auto companies upper management fault. The fundamental fact is the unions don’t run the company, they do. They were stuffing their pockets full of shareholders cash while not investing in the future. The union saw how much profit was being diverted into managements pockets and said to themselves, I want a little of that. Management could have said no, but it would interrupt their looting of companies and the stuffing of their pockets, so they paid them.
I’m not pro-union. They should have asked for more reinvestment, profit sharing and tying wages to managements wages. That would tied them together. But management makes the decisions, so they are the ones that made things as they are.
Tried Detroit, they failed, not UAW, but Detroit, Audi failed also.
Have had 6 Hondas, all from UAW plants in N. America, all performed well and reliably so, recommended same to family and friends.
Gave the older ones to the kids bought new for me and wife.
Honda has been slow, painfully so, in getting into electric propulsion, but I expect by 2027 their entire fleet will have an all electric option.
With all due respect to Sandy Munro’s past and present contributions, he’s only telling less than half of what happened.
U.S. auto companies got fat and lazy in the upper management in the 1970s. I remember it well, since I started driving my first cars at the end of that decade and into the 1980s: Chevy Vega, Plymouth Duster, Dodge Dart (1964!), Ford Pinto. I would own all of these with the space of a continent-spanning year. They were cheaper than any import of the same vintage, until you added up the repair bills (the Pinto was recalled, so that cost me nothing but time). The automakers didn’t react fast enough or well enough to the oil embargo and soaring gas prices, which the Japanese had long had to deal with, with their smaller cars.
Now, it’s the Japanese who are being caught short-sighted, mostly out of the electric car revolution even though they pioneered the hybrid transition to full plug-in EVs. It’s not right to lump Toyota and Honda into the same category as Tesla. Tesla is much more on the leading edge, while Toyota and Honda have squandered leadership even while they hang onto legacy designs while the market slips out from under them. Tesla better watch its cheaper back, however. There’s a whole class of 10k-20k microcars from China that the automakers have mostly kept from American consumers by demanding outdated safety standards that are anti-innovation and not even particularly safer for the class of slow speed, maneuverable vehicles that avoid crashes in the first place, or at least high speed ones. And, of course, in dense urban areas like NYC, more than half the people don’t even own a car, which is what makes the otherwise high cost of living bearable.
GM, which Munro cites, bought back $5 billion in stock in 2022, and continues to buy back shares today. As CEO Mary Berra points out, 94% of her income comes from “performance” – meaning stock market returns from her options, but did she share that $5b with GM’s workers? Did it go into R&D? Did it go towards paying down GM’s debt, now at higher interest levels? The answer to all of those is No!
The autoworkers who remain now work a more technologically challenging job than 40-50 years ago, in a losing bid to fend off automation that will take most of their jobs anyway, but they do it in a two-tiered pay system that has the newest workers making $17/hour, which is less than most college student workers make while working their first entry level jobs to help pay for college (also inflated beyond the CPI in that time period).
If the so-called “Big Three” are flailing and failing, it’s because they didn’t head the market when Tesla and China were riding the curve and even ahead of it, not because their workers didn’t respond. American autoworkers and workers in general are still among the most productive in the world, but our American cost-of-living, including having to pay for health care that is free or nearly so, in Canada and European countries, is paid by the auto companies here.
There are so many things contributing to the demise of American auto companies – there used to be dozens pre-WWII, and it wasn’t the unions that made them fade away back then. The unions are a small piece of that, if at all.
Yup. The blame belongs squarely on management. Not that the UAW is completely blameless, but even a lot of that is the fault of management. The US auto industry ignored Deming’s work on quality. Which he developed to address issues in the American auto industry. Wanna guess who proved to be a receptive audience? Japan. It did wonders for their auto industry. Now one reason the US auto industry turned up their nose was the core principle in Deming’s work was that everybody was involved in the process of producing quality products. Everybody has input and some degree of control. Management didn’t like that at all. Working with workers was not an option. Collaborating with workers was anathema, workers were the opposition. And that adversarial approach to workers was a significant obstacle to producing quality products. Not to mention, the designers and engineers often had no clue how their products were manufactured. So their designs often could not be manufactured in a quality way. The idea was to throw the design over the wall to manufacturing and then inspect and test the results to find the flaws. Which then got addressed by people who weren’t in manufacturing. Once the product was out in the wild, any problems with maintaining the product got addressed on the backend with a similar process.
So things like the Vega, Pinto and Chevette were produced.
It’s all going away real soon one way or the other anyway. There won’t be very many jobs humans are needed for. It won’t matter whether the UAW or the Writers or Actors went on strike or didn’t. 10 years from now AIs and robots will do their jobs. It will do the jobs of the Executives at the companies and the Engineers as well as the line workers if they are still in business. We don’t have much longer to put off talking about how we should redesign the economy and Society to deal with that.
Hey, I want a Crown Vic …
I owned a 1984 Oldsmobile. Precisely engineered planned obsolescence struck at 105,000 miles and the engine could not be repaired. Ever after I drove Porsche and Toyota. I am driving a 1986 Toyota MR2, runs like new, best car I ever owned. 7300 red line really sings. I have yet to meet someone who recommends his Detroit iron.