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I guess we’re going to get to get a sneak preview of what life will be like if we let the auto industry shut down. It was announced today that all three automakers will be extending their usual two-week Christmas break at many of their plants.
Ford will extend the break to three weeks at 10 plants, everywhere but at Claycomo, MO, and Dearborn, MI, – where the Ford F-150, the Mercury Mariner and the Ford Escape are built. That’s right: a pickup and two SUVs.
General Motors will close down 20 North American plants and halt construction on the new plant in Flint, MI, which is to build the hybrid Chevrolet Cruze and the electric plug-in vehicle, the Chevy Volt.
As for Chrysler, it's closing down all 30 of its plants for an extra two weeks. That includes all its Jeep plants. It’s not clear whether they will have enough cash to open them up again. A total of 46,000 employees will be affected.
If you’re wondering how this will fly, watch the news out of Ohio and Indiana.
I did some quick Internet surfing, and came up with about 1,300 hourly workers at General Motors’ Toledo Powertrain plant, 2,700 others at the Jeep assembly complex in North Toledo, and another 1,000 at a parts machining plant in nearby Perrysburg Township. Chrysler operates three transmission plants and a casting plant in Kokomo, Ind., and employs about 5,300 people there. Outside Cleveland, Ford's Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake, employs 2,300 people and the Chrysler stamping plant in Twinsburg about 850. There don’t appear to be any plants near Cincinnati or Indianapolis.
And these are only the ones who are employed directly by the Big Three. I’m sure that many parts manufacturers will be idle, waiting to find out if their parts are needed after January 20, when most of the plants are scheduled to reopen. Plus, every restaurant, movie theater, Wal-Mart, grocery store, shoe store, furniture store, clothing store . . . well, the whole state will suffer.
And that includes the states themselves, of course. Just as tax revenues are down in Kansas, they are down in Indiana and Ohio, plus their unemployment trust funds are already nearly depleted. Just think how bad those balance sheets are going to look after a month of everyone trying to stretch their family budgets.
Both Indiana and Ohio have one Democratic Senator and one Republican Senator. I wonder how their people are going to feel about their Republican Senators voting against the auto industry bailout this time next month?
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4 comments:
Hey Cathy.
Wondered if I could use this one in the next issue of The PlainDealer?
Melanie
When I tell people that killing the auto industry will have a ripple effect throughout the economy, they say it's what we deserve. We don't deserve this. Of course, this is a union busting thing and I've discovered that many people in this area hate unions, partly because they have no ideas of what unions have done for average working men and women.
It also seems strange to me that we can bail out banks and Wall Street types, but we will let the auto workers sink.
I agree Artemis. I have watched for the last several years as unions have lost power. The middle class has paid and continues to pay a severe price.
Everyone knows what the ripple effect will be. Union memebers generally don't vote Republican, nor do they typically contribute to them. I am just amazed that the other businesses that will be affected don't have the lobby to turn the GOP around.
I disagree about union members not voting Republican. They were a very important element in Reagan's ascendance to power. I have never understood how any union man could support Reagan after what he did to PATCO.
I seem to recall that George W. Bush got support from rank-and-file union members in 2004. Not from the union organizations, mind you, but from the people who actually work on those assembly lines. It was a question of patriotism in a time of war, they said.
Well, I hope those "patriotic" union members wake up and see what it truly means to support our country, especially our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
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