Toyota will open a new $1.3 billion manufacturing plant in 2010 in the town of Blue Springs, Mississippi. Why not Michigan? Because auto manufacturing plants in the Midwest operate with unionized workers whose representatives have a history of making onerous demands on management. Just look at GM: it spends more on union-negotiated health care and pension plans than it does to manufacture cars!
The facility in Blue Springs will be the first new auto manufacturing plant to open in the south since the 1980s. The addition of the new Toyota facility will further enhance the region’s reputation as the Southern Automotive Corridor, where none of the foreign-owned plants is unionized.
The economic benefits to the region will be several billion dollars, not only from Toyota, but also from a new Hyundai Motor Company plant in Montgomery.
The foreign-owned auto manufacturing plants are providing good-paying, non-union jobs as well as contributing sizeable tax revenues to the areas in which they operate. While the large Detroit companies (i.e., GM, Ford, and Chrysler) suffer one economic blow after another, the foreign-owned auto manufacturing plants in the south are providing ten of thousands of jobs, economic security, health and pension benefits, and all without union representation.
Anyone who wants to see the future of the US auto industry need only look at what is happening in the Southern Automotive Corridor.
