Detroit is in trouble; General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have squandered resources and missed opportunities for decades now, and their greed and lack of foresight have made them vulnerable to bankruptcy, takeover, or outright collapse. Of course, the leadership of these troubled companies has gone begging to Washington for help. The automakers shouldn’t be helped; they should be allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits. They have received enough federal assistance over the decades that the fault for their current crisis lies firmly on the shoulders of upper level management. Let those who created this crisis pay for their misdeeds by failing as a consequence; we will all be better off if they fail.
Instead of bailing out Detroit, bail out its workers; use the proposed 25 billion dollars to keep the loyal, faithful, talented, and skilled American auto workers around, so that they will be available for whomever should pick up the pieces of the broken American automotive industry. Keep those workers’ paychecks and insurance going; in the short and long term, this will be cheaper than having them go on unemployment. For everyone above middle management, let them join the increasing ranks of the unemployed. This is fair; for over thirty years, Detroit’s answer to increased payroll costs was to cut the bottom ranks while enriching the top. Those who have benefitted so long from these irresponsible, reckless policies of profiteering should now be the ones to suffer for driving their industry off a cliff.
The Big Three have been protected for years by Congressional legislation designed to frustrate foreign competition and promote American company built vehicles, to include generous defense and GSA contracts from which foreign companies have generally been excluded. Yet still, with all of the US subsidization, Detroit has failed to successfully compete, even domestically. GM, Ford, and Chrysler have consistently sought to make the quick buck for their leaders while failing to look into the future and modernize their operations and products. At one time in America, the rallying cry was “Buy American”; but seriously, given all of the scandalous behavior by American auto makers, and their failure to provide quality at a reasonable price, it has become increasingly evident that better options exist. Risk-to-profit-ratio assessments as a justification for putting unsafe products on the road gave an incredible boost to the domestic market for foreign cars, while foreign manufacturers aggressively sought to build factories in the U.S.
Contrary to opinion at the time, the foreign automakers actually provide better, here and abroad, for their employees that the Big Three ever did. The reality behind that disparity comes from a more egalitarian and far less bloated sense of the responsibilities of and compensation for management. If Detroit should fail, than those foreign automakers, especially Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Benz, will be more than able to step in and restore dignity to American auto manufacturing and to its American workers. They may even retain or restore American labels, although that shouldn’t really matter. These companies do not generally look to their workforce and quality control first when it comes time to cut costs or increase profits; the foreign companies take a much more holistic and proactive approach. Foreign automaker takeover of American manufacturing, in the long run would prove beneficial to everyone, from the consumer to the auto workers, but would rightfully leave out the architects of the American auto industry collapse.
Financial sector bailouts were necessary to protect the overall economic system of the U.S. and the world; even so, we saw in the few short weeks following the bailout talks the same executive extravagance that preceded the very collapse it caused. Detroit would do the same with a bailout. Detroit would continue to lay off workers while granting bonuses to their failed executive corps, and still fail to modernize their thinking, products, organization, safety, and technology. If there is to be a bailout for Detroit, let it go exclusively the workers who will be needed to repopulate the factories after transition and just let the executives and their institutions of greed fail.
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