America’s Dirty War Against Manufacturing
Bob Lutz, the former head of GM, says it was neither uncompetitive wages nor unions that drove the Big Three into decline. It was a management with its eye focused on the bottom line and the short term.
That sentiment should be familiar to students of Deming (it is one of Deming’s 7 deadly diseases). It is sad that this bad management practices, short-term thinking, continues to do harm several decades later. Hopefully we can do better in the next few decades.
retiree health care and pensions — burdens that are borne by society, not manufacturing plants, in every other advanced country. That disparity, the result of policy decisions made in Washington rather than wages negotiated by the United Auto Workers, was the source of most of the labor-cost advantage enjoyed by foreign companies.
The excessive health care costs in the USA, another of Deming’s 7 deadly diseases, has continued to get worse every year since he classified it as one. The damage that the failed health care system in the USA does to the USA is enormous.
Related: Manufacturing Skills Gap or Management Skills Gap? – Manufacturing in the USA, and Why Organizations Often Don’t – Big Failed Three, Meet the Enlightened Eight
This is the type of thinking that the USA’s success was built on and what subsequently dragged the rest of the world down with it in the GFC. It is dangerous and needs to be managed before patterns repeat themselves and hurt or destroy other people’s lives.
It is simply sad that this short term thinking is rife in society.