Their cars were ugly, not innovative, poorly built with built in obsolescence and never met the needs of the marketplace.
Not to an extreme degree, and not all of them. Some of them where quite good sellers, and some get good quality scores.
Sure......to some degree but not enough to keep them from BK.
It was hard to attract industry that would pay as well and compete for workers.
Which is one of the reasons why the other industries didn't grow in the area when the car companies where strong and where increasing employment. But after they started to lay off people you had available labor.
But the cost of living was still high.....because you still had people making major bucks at the auto companies. Only now are costs coming into line with reality.
The same problem plagued the old GDR. While Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have prospered because they have become recipients of new industry coming from more expensive Western Europe, the old GDR has languished because West Germany, trying to be fair, brought the old GDR Deustchmark into parity with the W. German Deustchmark. Consequently, its much cheaper to build a new plant in Poland than in the GDR even with all its surplus labor and so the GDR's unemployment rate remains high and the upgrading of the economy has moved very slowly.
The same is true for MI. Its only now that real estate costs have plummeted that industry paying its workers much less can afford to set up shop in that state.
Why you insist on blaming the unions when ultimate control was with mgmt is beyond me.
I don't absolve the management, even apart from the union issues they made some bad decisions, and they also can't be absolved for the biggest bad decisions they made, their dealings with the unions. But you seem to want to absolve the unions of all responsibility when the reality is they played a huge role. You also seem to want to absolve the poor business climate created by local and state government, but doing so is incorrect.
I don't absolve the unions but they were not in as much control as you seem to think. Maybe back in the 1960s and 1970s but by the 1980s, the car industry was already on the ropes. Weak mgmt refused to do what needed to be done to keep the unions in check. |
