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Not quite, I lived in Detroit during its hay days of building cars....The unions picked one company to strike,they figured they would pick the weakest one. When that company settled,all the other company's followed. I blame the company's as much as the unions, management just gave them what they wanted and kicked the can down the road cause they wouldn't be blamed. Another thing is the lines shut down for 6 weeks every year for change of models but the workers planned ahead for that..my BIL worked his way up from the line to head paymaster and my sister put up enough food for those 6 weeks....no Workman's comp. Back in the 40’s early 50’s, but the cars they build had a 3 year life span usually. Ford frequently stood for .....Found off road deliberately....It took competition from other countries for the Big 3 to finally build a decent car that did not have built in obsolescence....But one good thing was every kid knew how to fix his care. Now its all computers...

I don't think they ran the plants 24 hours a day either. The Ford plant in Highland Park was huge. The best car I had when younger was a hatchback Gremlin.(I think, that was back in the 60's. Hubby hated working on that car. The money the unions received just caused the price of the car to go up. We bought a 4 bedroom 8 room colonial for less than what you pay for cars in the last 20 years..

Right about the limited lifespan of cars back in the day. In 1965 my dad had a 57 Chevy (the sort of car collectors fight over nowadays). These days 8 years for a car is no big deal; back then it was different. One day in ‘65 I stepped out of that car (pink and white, cool colors), and stepped on the rocker panel. Car was so eaten by rust that entire rocker panel came right off (and I weighed all of 60 lbs or so back then). Remember my dad saying once car hit 100K miles, it was no good. Gremlin was probably early ‘70s; AMC had the Pacer back then too, it looked like a greenhouse on wheels. You’re right about homes, they were crazy cheap back then.