Don't Blame the Consumer

Ford Motor officials' decision to shutter two plants, one in Norfolk Va. and one in St. Paul, has understandably upset many plant workers.

"People do not buy American products. We all buy foreign cars. We all buy foreign products," White yelled after learning he would be losing his job.

Leaving aside the fact that it's difficult to talk about cars as being "foreign-made" and "American-made" these days, consumers are not the ones to blame for the closings.  Consumers want to get the best product for their money and for lots of consumers, that means buying a car not made by one of the Big Three American automobile producers.

Blame can be appropriately heaped onto politicians who passed and lived with tariffs and quotas that shielded US automakers from competition.  Blame can be placed on union and firm negotiators who agreed to contract language that allowed stuff like this:

If there's no work, they go into Ford's union-mandated jobs bank, where workers continue to report for their shifts, even if they aren't working, in exchange for getting most of their old wages and benefits. But Ford is expected to push hard to get rid of the jobs bank when the current union contract runs out next year.

According to this article, the jobs bank is not "union-mandated," but was negotiated in union contracts back in the 1980's:

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

In other words, the jobs bank was given to union members in exchange for the ability to use more machinery.  It was not mandated by "the union."  It was agreed to by union and management negotiators acting for their principles.

Lastly, blame can be placed on automakers who, responding to the short-run shield provided to them by tariffs and quotas, allowed development of cars of lower quality than competitors and agreed to inflexible work rules.

Addendum:  a couple of years ago, a driver pulled his car hauler in front of a neighbor's house to pick up a car and transport it to Washington where the neighbor's daughter lives.  Our boys (and dad!) thought it was really, really cool to have a car hauler parked outside so my family and I went to look at it.  The driver, a friendly fellow, and I were talking about this and that , but one remark he made has stuck with me.   He pointed up to the cars sitting on his hauler with their undersides exposed and said:

When you look at the undersides of these cars, it's easy to see that Japanese cars are much better-made.

That, in a nutshell, is why consumers are not to blame for the Ford plants' closing.