Good paying union jobs.

around Lake Erie was a manufacturing powerhouse til the 1970s. Then heavy industry such as steel production started moving overseas, taking the generally good-paying blue collar jobs with it. It's nice that you can no longer see the air, and that the rivers don't catch on fire as often, but there's a lot of vacant land that used to provide good livings.

who thought that "small" meant "cheap" and that's what they produced, the rolling bomb called the Pinto and the car famous for rusting on the showroom floor, the Vega (which also featured engines that self destructed). The cars were badly made, tinny, and no damned fun to drive since they ignored basic ergonomics. They slit their own throats that way and are only now starting to produce the high quality, fuel saving small cars they should have done from the start. They still don't advertise them as heavily they do the big gas guzzling SUVs and trucks.

The truth is that VW had already made inroads, offering fuel efficient small cars since the 1950s. Toyota just picked up another share of the market for small cars, especially in urban areas. There was a big market for them that the Big Three missed entirely, and that market existed long before OPEC did.

Management greed also helped kill off the industry, greed that got around the unions by outsourcing parts manufacture--first to the south and then outside the borders. Only the final assembly remained in Michigan, and even that was under fire from greedheads in the carpeted offices. Yes, their advertising budgets were higher than wages. However, advertising revenue is seen as having money roll in, while the people actually doing the work of making the product were always seen as money rolling out. This is a POV that exists in management courses country wide and is responsible for most of the ills today as workers are devalued completely.

Flint used to be the American Dream, good jobs allowing workers to own their own homes and buy the products they spent their lives making. The main problem is that it was reliant on only one industry, so it was easy to kill when that industry's executives managed to foul everything others had built up completely.

NAFTA and GATT were just final nails in the coffin that had been built by bad management that had misread the market, been too slow to modernize and mechanize manufacturing, and allowed inferior products to roll off the line, expecting advertising to sell them to a public that really wanted to buy American, but got turned off fast.

By Thomas Moore Ross Perot
February 15, 1988

http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/02/15/70199/index.htm

and I think I'd read it at the time, it looks familiar. Nepotism in the higher ranks was a problem, but the recruits from all the glitzy b-schools across the country were worse. The former delayed things like mechanization and other improvements that would have given them a more competitive product and the latter were the ones who devalued a trained labor force completely, outsourcing everything they could possibly outsource, killing jobs, morale, and eventually, Flint.

I remember when we bought our first non-used car back in the late 1970s (long before NAFTA), we opted for a cheap Japanese car over one of the American cars, both for its fuel economy and hopefully better mechanics. It was a Mazda GLC (which we said stood for "Got Little Cash&quot hatchback. It was kind of crappy, too. But better than what you could get for that price in a comparable American car, like a Chevy Vega at the time.

For many years, Detroit simply lagged behind foreign manufacturers in producing well-styled, fuel efficient, mechanically sound cars. We bought a Toyota that ran beautifully for 14 years, and we only traded it in because it was getting kind of embarrassing.

I think that differential is somewhat equalized now, so Detroit has the possibility of a real comeback.

But it's also a lesson in why regions should diversify their economies. We lived in Buffalo, NY in the early 1980s, and it was already in severe economic depression. Its basis in the steel industry had evaporated. Nothing lasts forever.

Detroit and SE Michigan were not just the Big 3 automakers, they supported hundreds of smaller factories that made the parts for them to assemble. My family worked for several of these smaller manufacturing plants.

of Republicans is what got them passed!

Germany and Japan pay their auto workers more than ours make and they have healthy, export-oriented auto industries. They deal with the WTO and other trade agreements even more than we do and do just fine.

The cause of our problems lies elsewhere.

The state economy is becoming more diversified and the Big Three are putting out quality vehicles that consumers want.

and as a kid of a middle-management GM employee that worked for different divisions and moved us around....

The auto companies themselves gradually abandoned Detroit by moving manufacturing elsewhere, and closing the Detroit-area plants. The actual peak of the industry was the middle '50s, right before the Packard plant closed, the first death in the Detroit auto family.

I see the reasons for Detroit's huge decline, which has been going on for 60 years as:

1) Corporate mismanagement. GM had such a massive ego about itself, and the other American companies followed them. They blinded themselves.

2) Foreign competition, mostly from Japan. Part of it was a quality issue, and part of it was the low cost of labor abroad, which the US could never match, even with the highest quality vehicle. As my dad put it, Japan could create more car for the same price.

3) Globalization, which tore down all US manufacturing sectors. In college I worked a summer job at a massive US Steel plant with 7000 employees that closed a decade later due to lower cost imports from Korea.

4) Detroit is a one-industry town, with everything related to the auto production, as the OP referenced. Even Motown Records left Detroit. As the auto industry dwindled, so did the city.

Mining of iron and copper, mining of limestone (MI had the worlds largest open pit quarrythat mined the limestone used to make coke a fuel that burns hotter than coal alone), Great Lakes shipping (remember the Edmond Fitzgerald), smelting/steel making.

Lots of those jobs weren't lost from America. They "went South", when southern states aggressively subsidized industrial relocation. Part of that was opportunity to modernize on the cheap, part of that was escaping unions and their benefit demands. NAFTA made it all that much worse. But "right-to-work" was a bitter phrase in MI for decades before that.

When the good jobs were in Michigan and you didn't drink the water in Mexico.

from 1995 to 2007. Just not in Michigan, and it had little or nothing to do with NAFTA or GATT.

It is likely that the whole automobile industry actually grew more than that, and that some of its growth occurred in our NAFTA neighbors; but 20% employment growth, during an era when robotics were displacing workers as well, is a far cry from collapse.

A few nukes and too much manufacturing goes boom!

So, give tax breaks to break up the one big area. And, industries went elsewhere.

Detroit sinks because jobs left with those tax breaks building plants in other parts of the country (and world). School busing pushed Detroit residents to cities and towns with different creative names neatly placed just outside the Detroit city borders. With fewer jobs there was no one to move into the empty houses in Detroit except people who were not allowed to drive through those creatively named towns while black, the disabled, and the poor.

If you want to blame the blacks, the auto company decisions, the city's decisions, you should be treated as a fart in the wind.

Great Lakes shipping was less important than trains and trucks. Detroit being on a river did not matter as much. Iron works moved to other countries. All the trees were gone after the Detroit fire and then Chicago fire. Cast iron stoves, steel cars, logging all moved elsewhere. The boon was over.

Do auto company CEOs make mistakes? Yes, they all do. Did their SIX YEAR lead time on cars leave them hanging? Yes. It is what it is!

Were Japanese cars tighter built? Yes. But, get this, Americans did not change their oil and their cars still kept running. The Japanese car owners did change their oil and their cars kept running.

Had they not, their cars would not run as long as an American car.

Americans change their oil now. And, American cars are now better than the Japanese and have been for years.

definitely takes away resources. It isn't the only thing but it and a combination of other factors did Detroit in.

The "giant sucking sound" was United States Presidential candidate Ross Perot's colorful phrase for what he believed would be the negative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he opposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

As I remember it, the conservation campaigns of the 70s after the OPEC embargo took a back seat when Reagan took office. No more of that sissy stuff! Nope, it was back to building big trucks and SUVs, V8s, and other gas guzzlers that Detroit and Houston loved. Macho, baby! Power!

Whenever I hear somebody try to blame American workers for the decline of U.S. automakers in the 1980s through 2000s, I remind them that Toyota, Honda, and others were building and selling lots of quality vehicles in the U.S. using American workers during the same time period. The problem wasn't the workers.