My stepmom will mind: she’s a nurse at a GM plant, and while she doesn’t make the cars, her job is directly related to patching up the people that do. My brother in law will mind, because he puts them together and needs the money to feed his kids. And the places where the autoworkers spend their money – the grocery stores, the Targets and Kohls, and the Applebees’ and corner bars will mind, as they close up and send their employees away in a chain reaction. I live in SE Michigan, and the auto industry is huge here.
If the car companies had put more folks on R+D of small, efficient cars instead of SUVs, there might not be that kind of trouble now – but SUVs were selling. The engineers working on the efficient cars were given second-class treatment here, unlike in Japanese firms, where they had esteem. That much is the car companies’ fault. Perhaps they have learned.
The immense amount spent on worker (and mostly retiree) health care is dragging them down like an anchor. If they were able to put money into engineering rather then retiree health care, they might make a better product. One thing people might not realize is that German and Japanese firms are able to put that money into R+D because worker and retiree health care is taken care of by their governments’ socialized health plan. In a very real way, the better cars from other countries are subsidized by those countries’ taxpayers. Socializing medicine in the USA would go a long way to making the US automakers more competitive.
However, as we have seen from the collapsing housing bubble, an industry in the toilet doesn’t affect just that industry, or even just that region. A mass employment-fail in the Midwest will affect the whole country, both by people moving into other regions for jobs, the increasing number of people needing government assistance (which we all pay for), and the chain reaction as other industries don’t do as much business and have to lay off their own workers.
Whether they think so or not, I think a lot of people will end up minding, and the adaptation will be slow in coming.