As a Michigan native, I am painfully aware of the need to "do something" about the Big Three automakers. Although I'm neither an employee nor the relative of an employee of Chrysler, Ford or GM, it's rare that I go through a week without making contact with folks who are UAW members, or employed by GM as management or salaried staff. I feel strongly that the Big Three have squandered our trust, avoided responsibility and disregarded a moral and practical mandate to produce more energy-efficient vehicles, but the failures of upper level policy makers are not those of the people desperately clinging to the only jobs they have ever known. In this town, entire families have made their living for generations in the auto manufacturing industry from working on auto assembly lines to punching in and out at smaller parts plants.
If we let the Big Three continue to circle the drain until they are no longer with us, what happens to those people, their families and all of the businesses in this state that depend on Big Three employees with money to spend? If the government gives them a giant check with no strings attached, what happens to the taxpayers who foot the bill and risk no better return than temporary triage?
Two articles today focus on this dilemma, and although they are written by thinkers from two different coasts who (as far as I know) don't actually know each other, both pieces conclude that no bailout should occur without conditions that involve restructuring the auto industry to produce fuel-efficient vehicles and (in one case) other alternative energy sector products. Amy Ephron's piece appears on One for the Table and The Huffington Post, and proposes a plan to fund the Big Three in exchange for requiring automakers to divert resources to the production of clean, green cars, batteries, houses and fuels in a way that keeps current UAW members employed and potentially creates even more jobs.
Thomas Friedman's Op-Ed in today's New York Times is similarly critical of the Big Three, and stresses the need for innovation and a workable business plan devised by an objective expert in exchange for any sort of bailout handout. Ephron and Friedman have clearly given great thought to this incredible mess, and I am intrigued by the notion that there is a compromise somewhere. Maybe the Big Three can be saved, along with the economy of my state, and maybe it can be accomplished in a way that preserves and creates jobs, helps the environment, and sends a strong message to car manufacturers that their bloated, inefficient and insular status quo is a thing of the past.