Beautiful Detroit! City of Vision! A Model for America's Future!
Let’s Consider the dollars and cents folks and it really adds up:
* Total pay and benefits for a full-time worker for the Big Three until recently averaged about $140,000 a year.
* The Foreign transplants? Just $80,000.
* Add in an estimated $2,000-plus per car for retiree health care and pensions for the Big Three, and the cost gap is huge.
* Two years ago, the Center for Automotive Research estimated that for every job created by a foreign transplant, 6.1 jobs were lost by the Big Three - many of them in Detroit.
And, based on their successes in the Motor City, the UAW plans to spend millions on organizing Honda, BMW and Nissan plants in the US.
Good luck with that, boys...
Beautiful Detroit! City of Vision! A Model for America's Future!
For both management and labor, it was the love of money.
Liberals killed Detroit along with the UAW.
Liberals have controlled Detroit since 1961.
Obligations of contract no longer mean anything, and judges are free to interpret and enforce (or not) contracts as they see fit. Scalia's famed opinion in the Lujan decision on standing to bring suit, adopted almost immediately by most states in the US, no longer applies in Michigan. Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Feel bad because your neighbor's kid got treated badly at school. You can sue for damages in a "representational" capacity.
the present term is supposed to fix that, with a new Republican majority, but we have learned that Republicans are just as often RINOs as conservatives. CJ Young is very good, but one newly elected member, Mary Beth Kelly, is not turning out to be a reliable conservitive. Newly appointed Brian Zahra has a fabulous reputation as a "rule of law" judge, but he went very wobbly trying to figure out which way the political winds were blowing.
Michigan is not a state anyone wants to be doing business right now.
I dont know how many of you have been there? But, it is the most shocking and amazing experience you’d ever have.
Some streets way out are actually fields and woodlands. You cant even tell that it was house to house neighborhoods anymore. I know, because I know people who lived there and took me to where they used to live when they were kids.
And it continues to creep out into the urban areas.
Not only did they price the big three out of the market, they priced American industry out of America. Now, everything is not only made overseas, but we’ve lost touch with the technologies.
Not only do we not make our light bulbs but our citizens don’t have the intelligence to screw them in. Otherwise, we would have never permitted the unions to take over this country and would have never elected this idiot to the presidency.
Democrats.
What is reason No. 2?
Don’t forget the stupidity and arrogance of GM! It was an important contributing factor.
I worked, in Detroit under Sheriff Bill Lucas, while Detroit began its decline. Coleman Alexander Young, I believe, had more to do in destroying Detroit. Young HATED his Police Dept, including everything it represented. Before the “Destroyer Young” the City was a great place to live, work, play, and shop. The UAW hurt the entire nation. Currently, the UAW is going after the Ford Motor Co.
No one ever wants to mention that 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room...
Middle class blacks and whites moved out as fast as they could....no one wanted their 1st grade child put on a bus at 7 in the morning to drive across town to go to a school with no she knows probably going to the same school..
Blacks were as pi$$ed as whites with forced busing...
I would make the case that Detroit would still be a city in decline -- especially as far as the automotive industry is concerned -- even if the UAW never existed and the city was a well-managed jurisdiction. I've come to believe that the single biggest factor in Detroit's industrial decline is that being situated on the Great Lakes system no longer provides industries with the advantages they once had.
Nowadays, having good access to major East Coast and West Coast ports (either directly or through Class I railroads) is more important to an industry. Cars don't need as much steel as they once did . . . which means they don't need access to Great Lakes ports where iron is barged in from Minnesota and Wisconsin . . . and they don't need to have miles of railroad tracks to bring coal in from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. I think geography is a bigger factor in Detroit's decline than most people realize. It's no coincidence that Detroit's decline is occurring even as other old industrial cities along the Great Lakes (e.g., Cleveland, Buffalo) are in decline, too.
I’ve just had a look at Detroit property.
What a tragedy.
Although...
I live in a very cheap former mining town in northern England, also with low employment and the manufacturing industry decimated.
It seems I can pick up a decent sized five bedroom 3 bathroom detached property over there, if I sell my tiny little ex-miner’s 3 bedroom terraced house (would’ve been four but they had to move the bathroom indoors) here.
The positive news is that I worked with some other entrepeneurs and we’ve finished getting the village hooked up to three different next-gen broadband technologies. As a consequence businesses are getting interested, two senior architects working for high end IT consultancies have moved into our neighborhood, the business park is expanding for the first time since... ever, property prices are on the up and there’s even talk of us getting a major national railway station up the road which’ll rejuvenate the rest of the local area.
So, it is possible to turn an industrial wasteland into a hotbed of entrepeneurship, even in That Yorkshire.
So... Detroit.
Is it worth a punt?
Speaking as a refugee from Detroit AND the Big 3 - - -Much as I loathe the UAW, it did not kill the CITY of Detroit. What did that was, in two words, Coleman Young, the original Robert Mugabe of Michigan. All round the city are prosperous suburbs, generically known as Oakland and Macomb counties. GM, Ford, and Chrysler all built new plants in the 'burbs, which was partly due to simple logistics - transport to and from the downtown plants wasn't as easy as a greenfield plant in, say, Lake Orion. But also partly due to high taxes and graft that Young brought to a fever pitch within the city. Most of those new plants are still operating, and are still getting the best new machinery, (which was my piece of the puzzle). But the exodus of PEOPLE from Detroit was purely political - the corruption and racism that Young brought in was more than they could stand. This has contributed to a further decline of the city infrastructure, to the point where the majority of it now is only good for bulldozer practice.
Welcome to Starnesville
It’s never that simple. Agree 100% the unions were a big problem. But how about clueless management? They ran wasteful operations, completely missed markets, allowed crap cars to be produced, and generally didn’t give the consumer what they wanted most of the time.
Meanwhile, the Japanese companies run a tight ship, and have for decades had design bureaus here in the US to meet US consumer desires. And they were never afraid to tackle a technical challenge. The end was in sight with the Big 3 said it was impossible to meet emissions standards, and Mr. Honda brought showed off his CVCC engine that already did.