The auto industry, as practiced by GM/Ford/Chrysler, is still an artifact of the CIO days; unskilled labor on an assembly line, doing the same repetetive task X number of times per how, with breaks, for 8 hours straight time, time and a half overtime, double time after 16 hours, double time and a half on Sundays and hollidays..and so on.
In the looming future, except under certain totalitarian nregimes (North Korea comes immediately to mind), there will be less and less demand for non-skilled labor.
Why would a manager continue to pay what appears to be an FTE cost of over $100000/year, for which he gets value (based on work rule constraints on productivity in the contract) of no better than .8 (more like .6) FTE per 100 large in labor cost, when he has the option of automating his operation, the cost of which, when amortized, will be significantly less that that of carrying the union labor burden? The answer is, he won’t. ALL of these jobs are going away, and the result will be, better, cheaper cars, made in the US by US robots (they don’t even have to take a restroom break, let alone vacation and sick time and, once you buy them, they cost pennies a day in electricity). If I was a UAW line guy, I’d get my ass into a re-training program and aquire some skills with a potential to make a better living (at a job that doesn’t bore you into helpless fury every day).
NAFTA didn’t do this. Staying unskilled in an economy that can replace you with a wind-up machine is doing this.
