Re: \"What\'s good for General Motors, is good for America!\"
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Patently untrue. GM's avg cost for health care and pension benefits per car is $1,360. Honda's US plants average $107 per car.
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You need to compare across production costs in the same regional markets. The auto sector is not like electronics. You don't make cars in Southeast Asia and ship them over here. Do you have the figures for just North America?
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Japanese companies pay nothing for health care costs at home because of socialized medicine.
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This will not help them in North America. Japanese firms also contribute a lot of social welfare costs to the state through various matching policies and corporate taxes, so you cannot just make this simple comparison of health care versus no health care.
Further, if the story is all about labor costs, why are the Big Three also getting killed by German car manufacturers? Labor costs in Germany are significantly higher than here.
The bottom line is that the Japanese crushed the Big Three at the level of corporate strategy. The lean-production system was simply much more powerful than the Fordist system and the Americans never really learned. Further, they never changed the nature of their supply relationships. Some costs do hurt the Big Three, but these things are invoked to avoid facing up to the bitter truth: They just got their ass kicked over time because they were too proud or too stupid to fundamentally rethink the ways that cars might be made. End result: The Japanese are more innovative and more nimble.
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