Word: unionizing
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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...
...before Dixie gets too smug, it should acknowledge a debt it owes Detroit, or rather Detroit's labor union, the United Autoworkers (UAW). The UAW has made the Big Three's labor force one of the world's best paid and protected - clout that is now a focus of what's wrong with Detroit. Still, the foreign automakers are in America in large part because, as their more fuel-efficient cars became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s and '90s, the UAW lobbied to get them to build production plants here...
...True, those Asian and European firms flocked to the South to avoid Detroit's high-cost culture. But while southern auto employees extol the union-free, right-to-work rules of their states, the truth is that they might still be earning the basement-level wages of a Mississippi textile worker today if the UAW hadn't leaned on the 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...
...market with, say, gas-guzzlers no one wants to buy anymore. "Southern communities understand you can't tie organizations down with restrictions," says manufacturing management expert David Miller of the Alabama Productivity Center. "Successful auto companies in the South provide all the positives you'd find in a union shop...
...President Fritz Henderson acknowledged the "Term Sheet" on the rescue package does require the automaker to obtain concessions from the union. But privately, union officials are saying that they didn't sign the term sheet, so they don't feel bound...