UW on Detroit

We are within 24 hours of a new auto bailout deal, said Sen. Carl Levin today. Sen. Chris Dodd, who has been a harsh critic of the auto industry and the bailout, finally got it right on “Face the Nation” today.

“None of us like this at all, and there’s a lot of reasons to be furious,” Dodd said, noting that more than 2 million auto-related jobs in the United States are at risk if the automakers fail. “But there’s a lot more at stake than Detroit. If this was just about some company in Detroit, I’d let them fail in a New York minute.”

Yet he is still forcing some of the blame on GM CEO Rick Wagoner:

“I think he has to move on,” Dodd said, noting that GM was in the worst shape of Detroit’s automakers. “I think you’ve got to consider new leadership.”

I think what people fail to recognize is that the Detroit 3 made their mistakes during the 1990s and have been retooling ever since about 2001. They have cut THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of jobs, closed plants, offered buyout plans and have straight-up laid off many white collar jobs making $100k+ a year.

Wagoner has done everything he can to keep GM above water, but there are fundamental problems with the UAW contracts.

I can’t seem to find the article, but I recall reading an article in The Detroit News about how Nissan was having its first assembly line workers in Ohio retire. The headline read something like “GM: 1,200,000; Nissan: 355″–talking about how many retirement packages GM has had to pay for and how few the foreign companies have had to deal with.

Those two problems must be worked out before anything else, and they are hardly Wagoner’s fault. I’m not a big fan of Rick Wagoner, so I don’t really care if he becomes the scape goat, I think people just need to be aware the problems are much more deeply rooted than the policies of one man or one administration.

I had to drive to downtown Detroit Saturday to drop off an internship application, and I decided to get out, walk around and take some notes, considering I hadn’t spent any time in the area for nearly a year.

1. It Lacks the Feel of a City: I’ve got to be honest, I spent most of my life in the suburbs. But in recent months, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Madison and Chicago, and they both have a certain feel for them. Detroit simply doesn’t have that–it’s quiet, cold, almost dreary. It was Thanksgiving and there was nobody shopping, nobody out and about.
2. Bums: Think State Street is bad? Oh man. The sad thing is the bums have given up on asking people for money–they just curl up in a ball behind a bus stop or in a park.
3. New Bars, Buildings, Hotels: There are several new of each of these in the downtown area from when I last walked around there in Thanksgiving of 07. Coming up is the Fort/Cadillac Hotel, which was remodeled into a Hilton.

Traffic, construction and the roads were awful too, just as a side note. If any of the Big 3 go down, part of Obama’s “New New Deal” may include redoing roads in Detroit, giving the jobs to former assembly line workers. As for the white collar jobs…I don’t know what’ll happen to those poor people.