What's Good For General Motors...

From 1985 through 1988, I worked on the assembly line at the General Motors North Tarrytown Assembly Plant, located in Westchester County, New York. At the time of my employment, the plant was building two models: The Pontiac 6000 and The Buick Century. By 1985, the fat years for American Automakers were a thing of the past, and the future looked uncertain at best. The Plant had cut back to one shift, prior to 1985, and was now bringing back the night shift, which was how I ended up being hired. Apparently, not everyone who was laid off when they cut back to one shift came back, so job openings were available.

Watching Toyota's ongoing recall debacle brought back some memories of my time working in the Auto Industry. I remember a pervasive sense of gloom hanging over us, due to the constant uncertainty and fear of layoffs. Everyone well understood that it wasn't Ford or Chrysler that threatened our jobs, if anything they were in worse shape then GM. No, even back in 1985 we understood that the real menace was the Japanese threat. I'll never forget the day when one of my coworkers drove up in a brand-new Nissan sedan. His defense was along the lines of "I'm not going to buy one of these cars we make". Implicit in that statement was a belief, on his part, that the product that we produced was inferior to what the Japanese were making. I had heard stories about foreign cars in the parking lots of American Auto Plants being vandalized, but that didn't happen to my coworker's shiny, white Nissan.

That is not to say that we didn't have strong feelings about what was happening to America's Auto Industry, only that we weren't exactly sure who to blame. The picture was a lot clearer for the older workers; they had no qualms whatsoever about blaming it on the Japanese. For those of us in our 20's and early-30's who had grown up in a different world, it was not so clear. For starters, few of us had any illusions about the nature of our jobs. The pay and benefit package was good, but the nature of the work was mind-numbing. We also realized that the odds of any of us low-seniority workers making it to 30 years, and a pension, were remote. Therefore, our attachment and loyalty to the company that employed us was tenuous, at best.

Something else that I remembered from those years was the ugly dustup between Japan and the United States over some derogatory remarks about American workers made by Japanese Parliament Speaker Yoshio Sakurauchi. In early 1992, Sakurauchi bluntly described the average American worker as "lazy and illiterate". I don't recall whether he was talking specifically about auto workers, but it seems likely since the Auto Industry was ground zero in the trade war between the two countries. Regardless, his comments caused an uproar here when they became known. I half-remembered an incident that involved workers at a factory and a poster of an atomic explosion with a caption reading "Made In The United States By Lazy and Illiterate Workers And Tested In Japan".

I was a bit fuzzy on the actual details, but the truth is close enough. While touring a Rolling Bearing Company of America plant in his home state, Senator Fritz Hollings (Dem.-S.C.) told the assembled workers that they ought to respond to Sakurauchi's comments by drawing up a poster such as the one that I described above. And while the home crowd he was playing to probably loved his suggestion, it didn't sit as well with the chattering classes and, while I don't know if he actually apologized, Hollings later claimed that it was a "joke".

It is probably too late in the game for our "Big Three" to ever catch up with their overseas competitors. Because it is not only Japan that we have to worry about. It is Korea today, and before too long, China and maybe India, will be flooding our domestic market with well-made, and probably less-expensive, alternatives to what Detroit is turning out. And it makes little sense to urge people to "Buy American" because that becomes a hopelessly muddled message if the parts come from all over the globe. Toyota assembles it's cars here in the US as does a number of other "foreign" automakers. So, I can only hope that this recall of Toyotas isn't limited to cars assembled in this country, otherwise the long-suffering American worker will once again find himself under fire.