Who's to Blame for GM's Problems?

GM's management has pointed to the UAW and high wage and benefit demands as a major cause of their current financial predicament. However, management is finding the finger pointed back at them in the blame game over who caused the company's current ills. From the Washington Post, more along these lines:

Doing Good Jobs, But Losing Them, by Harold Meyerson, Commentary, Washington Post Online:  From the outside, the Ford assembly plant ... isn't much to look at ... On the inside, though, Wixom is a thing of beauty, a marvel of American production. Most auto factories turn out the same basic car... At Wixom, three fundamentally different kinds of cars rolled off the line simultaneously. ... "No other plant built three different cars at the same time," says Dave Berry, president of the plant's United Auto Workers local.

Some years ago Ford established an annual audit of plant efficiency. For four years running, the Wixom plant had the highest score of any of Ford's North American assembly plants. In 2004 J.D. Power and Associates ranked the plant as the third-best auto factory in North and South America -- beating all the Mercedes and Toyota plants routinely touted as the be-all and end-all of auto production.

But there was a problem: the product. Wixom turned out lots of different cars, but chiefly it turned out Lincolns. For many years, Ford turned more profit on the Lincoln than on any of its other cars; it was the proceeds from Wixom that financed many of Ford's truck plants. But in recent years, Ford focused more on overseas acquisitions -- Jaguar, Volvo, Aston Martin -- than on improving the product it made in America.

"We kept arguing for a product that appealed to the customer," says Tony Brooks, a salty assembly-line worker ... "The quality of the plant is what kept us alive, not the cars. When did they last redesign the Lincoln Town Car? Ten years ago?" Cadillac, he notes, successfully updated its product line in the past few years. At Wixom, a fundamental adage of production was stood on its head. Making the sausage was a pleasure to behold; it was the sausage itself that ceased to appeal. On Jan. 23 Ford announced that it was closing factories across North America, and Wixom, its awards notwithstanding, was on the list...