Marketing experts used to say that train people didn't understand they were in the transportation business, not train business. Today auto execs don't understand they are in the transportation business, not car business. One Barnum Bailey Ringling Bros. auto company (Toyota?) might remain in 20 years, but the rest are going bye-bye. Here's the final installment by Kimberly Taylor of her visit to Detroit a few weeks ago.
"There’s a quiet that is the sound of hospitals. It is also the sound of the big three. There’s the typical Midwest kindness but it
is tinged by an inescapable pall mixed with gallows humor that down to the last
one they all have. “Just about everyone
here has packed personal belongings and brought them home,” we were told by a
friend. She said the exit drill is so
common that the thirty minutes to pack your possessions and be escorted out the
door isn’t enough time emotionally or physically. “I’ve been in the automotive industry my
whole life. I love what I do. I don’t know what to do. The
morale has never been lower,” were comments we heard from all of them. One important advocate, a lion, has been
offered a package. If you say no you may
be offered another and likely the deal will not be so sweet or you may have
your position just eliminated. 55 years
old and 30 years in the industry is the not so lucky target age. Too old to work forever. Too young to ever retire in an economy like
this. The cuts are never ending and they
long ago got rid of all of the fat. They
talk about their neighbors, foreclosures, the empty desks of friends whose
targets on their backs caught management attention. And still, rising above all of that, the
pride and loyalty and gratefulness they all feel to have been lucky enough to
have a role in this great capitalist undertaking rivals the confusion and sense
of loss." Part 3 of 3