Car Trouble

As one who grew up in Lansing, MI myself, this article is quite depressing, but oh so true. Back in the days when "company cars" were fashionable, my dad was given a '73 Olds Eighty-Eight, then a '79, then an '84, after which his architectural firm, like just about every other business, stopped giving them out. My first three cars were, you guessed it, a '73 Olds Eighty-Eight, then a '79, and then an '84. Anyone remember when the Olds Cutless Supreme was the best selling car in America? In the mid 1970s my older brother bought a 1964 Cutless 442 and boy could that car haul ass. He ended up working for GM, frequently getting laid off, brought back, laid off, moved to nights, then back to days, then to nights... The last five years he was in the "Jobs Bank" and more often than not was paid to go school or work at charity organizations. You would think that the company's managers could have figured out a way to put these guys to work while they were collecting pay checks, but evidently that was too difficult a problem to solve. He retired this summer at the age of 52. Those days are long gone.

Now that the new UAW contract will sever GM's responsibility for health care in 2 years, the management of GM will no longer have any excuses as to why they can't compete with Toyota and Honda. Of course the real problem isn't the hourly workers, it's that the US government doesn't cover health care and upper level GM managers and CEOs keep asking the workers to assemble crap or cars that nobody wants while making far more than their counterparts in Asia and around the globe. They'd rather take the entire ship down with them than change their mindsets or compensation packages. Well, Michigan economy, ave atque vale; sit tibi terra levis.

Postscript: The question was asked on this blog a week or so back, what was the worst year? In terms of the Michigan economy, it was 1973-74. Just about all construction stopped in the state -- my dad worked 10 months straight without a paycheck. One gets the feeling that the current downturn in Michigan, which is happening when most of the rest of the country is experiencing growth, is beginning to rival the 1973-74 recession. Of course the upside to the 1973-74 crisis was that it happened at a time when companies would not automatically cut loose their workers. Now they do so at even the smallest downturn, or more probably after a buyout or hostile takeover, to appease stock holders. Around 1990 my dad's firm was bought out by a larger firm in Grand Rapids, which within one year shut down the Lansing office and laid off all its workers. My dad was too old and had too much seniority to be hired by another firm, so he was forced to retire earlier than he wanted at 63.