50 years ago: Detroit gears up for record production

[Hannah Bell]

Detroit automakers are projecting record production in the first quarter of 1960, according to an industry trade journal.

The Big Three; General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, together with American Motors and Packard, project that they will turn out 2,240,600 cars in the first three months of the new year, eclipsing the quarterly record set in 1955, and moving toward the nine million car mark on an annualized basis. GM aims to produce well over 1 million cars in the first quarter; Ford about 620,000, and Chrysler, 380,000. US automakers will account for over 90 percent of all cars sold in the US, and nearly half of global auto sales.

The increased production will make up for a decline in 1959 caused by the recently concluded steel strike that lasted 116 days and involved 500,000 workers, which starved the nation's auto plants of steel.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/twih-n30.shtml#50

[Craftsman]

1. But that was before free trade

[Selatius]

2. I think in Japan, 90% of auto sales are cars from Japanese car companies.

In the US, it's more like 50%, but it's nowhere near the 90% mark that it used to be. On paper, comparative advantage makes globalization look like a good idea, but what appears to be happening in the real world is that corporations are shifting production to places to take advantage of pay differentials between respective pools of labor in each country instead of shifting production to find comparative advantage.

If American workers were truly better at producing Product A in terms of numbers produced in a given time frame compared to Chinese workers with Product A, then Chinese workers would still get a factory put on their land anyway to produce Product A because they get paid an average of 60 cents per hour after converting from American currency to Chinese currency. American workers can't compete, and the corporation gets a bigger profit margin.