Word: carlies
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...Still, most southerners champion their region's low-tax, non-union style of economic development, which they credit for luring overseas car companies like BMW and Kia to build major plants from Kentucky to South Carolina to Texas. More important, after spending the 20th century as America's industrial backwater - and after watching the conservative Reagan revolution they once led fade away in last month's presidential election - they hail the idea that the South is rising again in the 21st century. "The sense of confidence is palpable," says Jim Cashman, a management professor at the University of Alabama...
...likes of Mercedes in Washington. "Mercedes wanted a much lower pay scale when it arrived here," says Cashman, who notes that veteran southern autoworkers now earn "only fractionally less" than the average $27 an hour for Detroit workers (and often end up with more, thanks to the foreign car companies' bonus systems). "If not for the UAW pressure, the starting pay would have been more in line with the going wage rate of this region instead of this industry...
...same time, southern workers have taught the UAW an important lesson about helping to keep that industry viable. The foreign companies enjoy not only the South's lower legacy costs but a more flexible production culture. Unlike the Big Three, the southern car plants are far more agile when it comes to accommodating shifting market demand; and that's due largely to employees' willingness to exact fewer of the production rules UAW contracts are notorious...
...right now. The Mercedes plant in Vance recently had to cut back to a four-day workweek; and with even Japanese powerhouse Toyota facing U.S. sales slumps, the company this week said it's delaying the startup of a new plant in Mississippi that will make its Prius hybrid car. Even workers like Ray now feel that a union "would definitely benefit" Dixie autoworkers; and either way, says Cashman, the New South's economies "still have many, many miles of training and education...
Dodge makes a popular muscle car, the Challenger, that comes in Tora Red and Hemi Orange. (Hemi is car-speak for a type of engine that accelerates like a rocket). There's a shiny red one, with a big green bow on the hood, on the showroom floor in Overland Park, Kan., and sales manager Mike Sullivan is confident it will be sold - and soon...