Reply #24: Blame the corporatists [View All]

[nichomachus]

It's the corporatists, who saw workers as the enemy, and that created an adversarial relationship between workers and management. They were always fighting each other -- management because they wanted to exploit the workers (which they did to the max before unions) and the workers who had to protect themselves.

In this adversarial relationship, the good of the company and the good of the industry kind of fell between the cracks.

That sort of thing doesn't matter when times are good. However, when times are bad, everything begins to fall apart.

Can you just imagine what the auto industry would look like if the automakers had started making fuel-efficient cars back in the '70s, when we became painfully aware of oil as a problem, instead of spending hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars to fight fuel-efficiency standards. Imagine if they had put that money into developing new technologies. They would be on top of the world right now.