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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes. Just like how Ford, famously heavily unionized, folded and disappeared as Kia took over.

US automakers absolutely struggled in the 70s when foreign car companies showed up and started competing. It wasn't Kia that gave them fits, it was Honda and Toyota. It was 100% an existential crisis, and unions made the situation worse. Which isn't to say that unions are necessarily bad and didn't produce good things for their workers, but they made it very difficult for the US auto industry to adapt.

A link to a long series about the interaction between US automakers and the unions is below. Of note is the story about how automakers' market share declined precipitously in the early eighties when Japanese automakers figured out the US market.

The US auto industry is not a great example of how a union can work with an employer in the face of existential threats.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/08/business/uaw-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1981/10/11/f...

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/chrysler-bai... (Heavy International Competition)

The US automakers did not struggle because of unions. The US automakers struggled because they were led by incredibly pathetic people and genuinely did not know how to make good cars or run a business.

Unions were not who was responsible for their atrocious offerings during the 70s to 2000s.

US automakers' products were terrible, and there is plenty of blame to go around. But I have yet to read any analysis of that crisis (such as those linked above) that did not include unions as one contributing factor.

Don't look at the survival of a multinational as a metric, look at its places here. What happened to Detroit and those unionized jobs? Some remain, but much of Ford has been moved to Mexico. So yes, there was some folding and disappearing.

I was mocking the idea that unionization would cause a company to "disappear", not that unionization wouldn't impact the structure of a company or have other side effects.

I mean, Ford is in a pretty tough spot for the future. They couldn't compete in the ICE sedan market. Their cash cow ICE truck market is gone in 10 years. They have a LOT of debt that will cost a lot more to service now interest rates are up. So their only saving grace is a successful pivot to the EV market, but their software and software culture is bad, and they are not procuring very many batteries.

I think describing the US market of a global company isn't as compelling an argument as you think it is.

The parent comment topic is the benefits to US workers working on US market products. If Ford's US market footprint and manufacturing workforce has relatively shrunk over the decades, then that is absolutely relevant to the concern of long-term benefit to US workers.

Exactly. When we're talking about US auto unions, the market for those vehicles pretty much is the US market. The rest of the global sales are made with global (typically non-unionized) workers. If Ford can't make competitive cars for the US market, it doesn't speak well to the union vs. non-union competitiveness.

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