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Recently UAW leadership cited free trade with China as the latest factor contributing to the three-decade long shrinkage in American automotive employment. While the UAW is correct that China is fast becoming a major source of parts and components and eventually fully assembled cars, it's hard to imagine that the Union could do anything to change the inevitable. Free trade is now a government mandate. Even though the present administration penalized the auto industry to protect the steel industry, Washington isn't likely to be sympathetic to Detroit. If the UAW tried to protect jobs by forcing assemblers or suppliers to guarantee headcount, they will merely accelerate the decline of U.S. companies and potentially threaten their existence.

In the early 1980s the union argued that underpaid, exploited Japanese workers were taking away the jobs of American workers. The Union was correct that Japan had a labor cost advantage that penalized higher paid American jobs. But even in a politically more sympathetic climate that saw the enactment of import quotas, the job drain continued.

There was a great deal of hand wringing about how many vehicles people would be able to afford to buy as the country lost high paid manufacturing jobs. But that hasn't materialized as Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in history, partly through the availability of cheap, high-quality imported goods.

While the numbers of non-union automotive assembly workers in the United States has climbed, employment at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and at many of their suppliers has been in a permanent downward spiral. The loss of more than 15 percentage points in market share since 1980 shifted work from Big 3 assembly plants to competitors based overseas or to North American transplant assembly plants. Matching Japanese productivity eliminated more jobs, as has outsourcing at both the Big Three and at suppliers who have moved their plants to Mexico or across the Pacific.

# posted by Medical Information : 4:20 AM