Word: auto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This is the thanks you get for creating the middle class, Henry. In the throes of the biggest auto swoon since 1931, the headmen of Detroit go hat in hand to Washington to try to keep their once mighty industry upright for a couple of months and are treated as if they had invented the four-wheel-drive subprime mortgage. AIG torpedoes the entire economy and gets a $150 billion handout; Citigroup takes risks no sane manufacturing company would even contemplate and is rewarded with a $20 billion federal bailout. And the car guys...
...Detroit Three recently presented detailed restructuring plans to Congress - an application for loans and credit lines to tide them over until the economy rebounds. U.S. auto sales were down more than 30% in October - even Toyota wasn't spared. Detroit wants $34 billion to shelter 3 million jobs and $300 billion worth of business. The first time the companies came calling, on Nov. 19 and 20, Congress blew a radiator. "Even though all Americans want this industry to succeed, I cannot support a plan to spend taxpayer money to bail them out" is the way Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican...
...Benevolent Manufacturing State was the self-funded, full-employment, womb-to-tomb society - for autoworkers, auto executives, their families and their communities - that Henry Ford began in 1914 when he hiked the prevailing $3-a-day wage to $5. "Fordism" outraged capitalists; Ford viewed it as a way to make cars affordable to working people. His people. The industry sputtered during the Depression, an era that gave rise to the unions, but was revived by wartime production as Detroit's manufacturing capacity became a vital weapon in the Allies' arsenal. Detroit reshaped America, spurring a great migration from the South...
...Benevolent Manufacturing State achieved its full glory in the postwar period, a largely supply-driven era when Detroit could sell almost everything it made and could afford to give the United Auto Workers (UAW) most of what it wanted. From Linden, N.J., to Lorain, Ohio, to Long Beach, Calif., to be an autoworker was to have it made; to be an auto executive was to have made it. Detroit, says John Plant, the thoughtful CEO of partsmaker TRW, was about more than just industry: "It's the largest experiment of social re-engineering that any country has ever undertaken...
...everything. So why did it take Detroit 30 years to catch up? "Either the crisis isn't big enough or the vision isn't persuasive enough," says John MacDuffie, a manufacturing expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. Instead, during those years, the domestic auto industry has been a slow leak, skidding from one restructuring to the next, chasing its declining market share as its costs have inflated...