We Should Be Happy the Detroit Automakers Are Failing …They’re Bad For The Country

13 October 2008 Comments

While the old adage, “as GM goes, so goes the country,” may have carried a lot of weight in the 70s, the economy is no longer built around the American-auto industry. Japanese automakers have become the #1 producer in the world, and for a reason…

Princeton, Ind. — For years, Detroit’s Big Three car makers have paid their workers even when they aren’t needed on the assembly line.

This year, as the industry’s downturn intensifies, Toyota Motor Corp. finds itself doing the same thing.

Detroit Is Being Out-Worked

Stalwart Americans love to pride themselves on their work ethic. Americans won World War II because of their great work ethic. Americans defeated communism with their capitalist work-ethic.

So why are these same Americans sitting idly on their jobs? It’s been notorious the GM plants that pay employees to sit on their asses. When production gets cut, the assembly lines stop, and employees play cards, get paid, and do no work.

Suddenly Toyota finds itself in the same position as Detroit. Consumer demand is shrinking, and workers have nothing to do.

Toyota Is More Efficient, And Thus Wins

Faced with workers getting paid to do nothing, Toyota looked to a better alternative.

Toyota is using the down time to hone its workers’ quality-control and productivity skills. The company has pledged never to lay off any of its full-time employees, who are nonunion.

Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales, the company’s U.S. sales unit, said the company believes keeping employees on the payroll and using the time to improve their capabilities is the best move in the long run. “It would have been crazy for us to lose people for 90 days and [then] to rehire and retrain people and hope that we have a smooth ramp-up coming back in,” Mr. Lentz said.

When Life Gives You Downtime, Be Productive

The Toyota automakers definitely could have looked at the recession, and told their employees they can take time off, and rest while the economy goes packing for the next 6 months.

Instead, they are capitalizing on the time-off, and making their workforce more efficient, whereas the old-time automakers let their workforce collect cash, while increasingly making them more inefficient.

So we should be glad Detroit is failing, as it’s only going to create more room for automakers like Toyota to gain more market share. Toyota promises never to lay off employees, and to train them so their skills don’t become obsolete. What more could you ask for?