“Detroit needed to do a lot of things in the 1970s.  It needed to get better engineering, it needed to get control of its assembly process, and yes, it needed to lower labor costs.  But it did none of these things.  By the early 1990s, Detroit wasn’t even trying very hard to make a profit on cars.  Detroit was making profits on light trucks, where the higher sticker price made it easier to hide labor costs (and which foreign companies were not, anyway, very good at making).  It’s worth noting that Detroit’s focus on light trucks was not merely a management decision; it was what the powerful unions wanted, because they knew the math as well as management.  Light truck plants were better for the UAW than more Ford Focus capability. ” — Megan McArdle, explaining how the Big Three got to where they are today