The Auto industry isn't going south, it's just moved there

Warren Brown reports:

The domestic automobile industry seems to have gone to hell in a handbasket. The appearance is framed by bankruptcies in the automotive parts manufacturing business and by the enormous financial difficulties facing General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co.

But the appearance is profoundly misleading.

The automobile industry is in trouble, but it hasn't gone to hell. It only seems that way to people in the Midwest and Northeast, the once-strong regional bastions of Big Manufacturing and Big Labor.

The automobile industry has moved to the South.

It pains me to say it as a native black Southerner who still celebrates the South's trouncing by the North in the Civil War. But the South has risen again, this time aided by a massive restructuring of the global automotive industry that is moving parts and assembly plants there from the Midwest and the North in the United States, as well as from Europe and Asia.

Capital flows to where it can be the most efficient.It's hard to see how labor unions fit in the future of a productive auto industry.