NYT: The Autoworkers’ Pain

[Doondoo]

American autoworkers are suffering through another round of layoffs, factory closings and buyouts. This time DaimlerChrysler has announced that it will cut 13,000 jobs in North America. Ford Motor and General Motors offered buyouts to a total of nearly 200,000 hourly workers in 2006.

These losses stoke fears that America’s manufacturing base is disappearing, that the country is “de-industrializing.” With the loss of three million American factory jobs since the end of 2000 and the trade deficit at an all-time high, it’s easy to see China’s spectacular growth and assume that American factories are being gutted by foreign competition.

But global competition is not the whole cause for the car manufacturers’ problems, just as the answers are not to be found in protectionism.

Many of the car companies’ difficulties stem from some bad decisions by management and some uninspired car designs. Chrysler lost $1.48 billion last year and Ford lost $12.7 billion, the most in more than a century in business, while Toyota reported record profits and sales.

The plight of the workers who have lost their jobs is real and has to be addressed, but the U.S. manufacturing sector is far more robust than the struggle of the carmakers suggests. According to the United Nations, the United States accounted for 21.2 percent of world manufacturing in 2000. As China surged ahead in recent years, the American share of world manufacturing barely budged, falling to 21.1 percent by 2005, the most recent year available. American factories produced a record $1.5 trillion in goods that year.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/opinion/16fri2.html

[Fierce]

1. Or it could be the fact that

$4,000 of the price of every car made in America goes toward health care, and that it's past time for the Big Three to stand up and demand single-payer health care for all Americans.