I've never been a big Chrysler fan but I will feel bad for the workers who are going to lose their jobs over this, union or not.
I don't know about you guys but with all the auto makers in the world, the U.S. seems to take the biggest hit. Is it because U.S. auto companies just don't want to adjust to more fuel efficient models? 
You probably can't just peg one big reason to the U.S. car companies' troubles. I'm sure that putting all eggs in one basket (bigger gas-guzzlers while ignoring well, pretty much all else) has to be one reason. On the other hand, American cars just simply weren't as appealing in my opinion. I mean, I used to work for a rental car company so I drove a lot of bland Detroit cars, and boy, they were bland. There was definitely a difference hopping from, say, a Dodge Calibur to a similarly-sized Japanese/European cars. The fit & finish, and the polish level of the cars would be like night and day.
Whole other multitude of reasons could be the U.S. automotive industry's inflexible and expensive labor, low turnover ratio of inventories & lower capital utilization rates probably made it costlier for Detroit to produce cars compared to everyone else. (well, these were especially true when Toyota was teaching everyone a thing or two about lean production systems -- I dunno if Detroit has had any success in copying some of that since).
Or one can look at the economic history and simply say that it's finally time for the U.S. to do away with automotive manufacturing, since the "natural" progression of the economic output has been moving from agricultural -> manufacturing -> service. It's hard to compete with countries that are in better position for manufacturing cars. That is, they have a "comparative advantage" in manufacturing, whereas U.S. has the comparative advantage in the service sector.
I'm sure people will be writing case studies about the current state of U.S. automotive companies in the years down the line.
Topic: Chrysler goes kaputz. (Read 335 times)
