When I think of the hard working people making automobiles in the USA, I usually think of these plants and the cars they produce:
- BMW: Spartenburg, South Carolina
- Hyundai: Montgomery, Alabama
- Honda: Lincoln, Alabama
- Mercedes-Benz: Tuscaloosa County, Alabama
- Nissan: Smyrna, Tennessee / Canton, Mississippi
- Subaru: Lafayette, Indiana
To exclusively think of unionized Ford, GM and Chrysler plants in Michigan is counterintuitive, since few people I know would by products made at those plants. I wish mass media and politicians would get on the same page as Americans have been on for over 20 years: Americans do buy vehicles made in the USA, mostly from the above list. The spin doctors from the unions and the Big Three love to control our dialogue by saying "American auto manufacturers" and only mean Ford/GM/Chrysler, which is a lot like like saying "people" and only meaning "white people". It is a dirty rhetorical trick the American people are not on board with.
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These companies employ about 20% of american auto workers (60,000 vs. 250,000 by the big 3) but "auto worker" only refers to people doing assembly work: meat robots.
Both american owned and foreign affiliated companies employ several times more American Workers in their offices and dealerships than their factories including engineers, designers and customer service personnel. Of course these jobs are not concentrated in the People's Republic of the UAW (aka The Rust Belt) so they don't matter politically.
The good news: the growth of employment at foreign affiliates has been steady while american owned companies have been getting rid of American Jobs as fast as possible.
The bad news: it costs money to fire people. Bailing out GM will accelerate layoffs and plant closures without stimulating compensatory growth in our local foreign affiliates.
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