Everybody’s kicking the tires on the Big Three lately, trying to figure out what’s going on in Detroit. I am, too, and maybe like you, I’ve also wondered whether they’re trying to sell us another Edsel.
I sure don’t like the idea of taxpayers digging deep to bail out anybody’s failed businesses from the consequences of their own mistakes, but I have come to the conclusion that we will all be dramatically better off if we can resuscitate the American auto industry.
Getting that done won’t be simple. America's car makers are in a pickle because leaders at Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and the United Auto Workers union have made some bad decisions or, in some cases, no decision at all. Then they watched as their once-dominant position in the United States and the world automobile markets withered away.
That said, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t your grandfather’s auto industry, where buyers famously feared a car constructed on a Monday or a Friday because they’d heard that too many were built under the influence of post-weekend headaches (Mondays) or during widespread absences as workers got a head start on the next weekend (Fridays). Today’s auto workers (and auto managers, too) are motivated, productive and totally dedicated to quality.
The Big Three build now some of the best vehicles ever made. And despite some dithering, they are fully prepared to go head-to-head with foreign automakers by producing advanced hybrids and even an electric car. The American auto manufacturers are making positive changes. They just need time and some taxpayer funding in the form of loans to tide them over this very rough spot.
What convinced me to support the automakers’ plea for help was a daunting body of evidence that losing the industry to bankruptcy would be catastrophic for the rest of us in times that feature 6.7 percent general unemployment and the recent loss of 577,000 jobs in a single month.
Directly at stake are the dreams, plans and families of the quarter-million men and women who work at GM, Ford and Chrysler, including roughly 5,000 of our neighbors whose prosperity derives from the GM plant in Arlington. That facility’s payroll pumps $309 million a year into the pockets of our own local economy. Nationwide, up to 3 million more people work at dealerships, suppliers and elsewhere in the automaking chain, and their prospects are just as dire as if they were bolting fenders on chassis in Arlington or Detroit. I’m not willing to kiss all that goodbye.
Nor am I anxious to say hello to a new era in which the number of businesses competing with each other to sell us their cars is declining instead of expanding. The Big Three still sell more than half of all the cars and trucks in America, and have the capacity to compete everywhere in the world with rivals from Japan, Korea and Europe. Politicians can’t be picking winners - that’s for car buyers to do - but it seems plain to me that our national policy shouldn’t abandon American car manufacturers. After all, the prices on those Toyotas and VWs aren’t going to drop if their American rivals all go bust.
Some complain that what auto workers make is too much money. Workers are often said to earn $70 an hour, but that’s a misleading number. The actual starting pay at the Arlington GM plant is about $15 and hour, and the average American autoworker brings in about $28 an hour. These are decent wages, but they won’t make anybody rich. Their benefit package - wages, insurance and retirement - does approach $70, but so do the benefit packages of many other workers. And a decent standard of living for all Americans is a good thing, in my opinion.
The public face of GM, Ford and Chrysler is the local dealership. These are exactly the sorts of small businesses that Americans idealize because they form the bedrock of local economic progress. The average dealer hires 50 people and pays them $48,300 a year on average. Dealerships, along with vendors and manufacturing plants, account for one in 10 jobs in America, and the automaking industry as a whole amounts to 4 percent of our gross domestic product.
The efficient manufacture of automobiles was invented in America when the assembly line made cars affordable enough that everyday working people could own them as well as make them. Through most of human history, the speed of economic progress was roughly the same as that of your horse, but cars changed all that.
They made us a nation on wheels, where labor could chase capital and ordinary people could go wherever opportunity beckoned. America was built on that kind of personal success, and if diminish it, we’ll see a part of the American dream go stale, too.
Finally, I want to remind everybody that the Metroplex is no stranger to the dire effect of large-scale job losses, as anybody who experienced the glory days of defense giants like Convair and LTV will recall. One day you were an aircraft engineer protecting your country from the Soviet menace, the next you were fixing air conditioners, if you were lucky.
Those bad old days are fading from memory, but the sudden, unnecessary loss of 5,000 jobs in our area just as the nation dives into a deepening recession will constrict lives and crush spirits. It will become a grim story that a generation of old timers can talk about decades from now.
That, it seems to me, is enough reason to give the Big Three a loan with the condition that the U.S. taxpayer first in line to get repaid when the automakers get on their feet again. A little help now, I think, will pay all of us large dividends later in happiness and opportunity, not to mention lower prices on better cars.
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