Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
And there I always imagined that the Big Three's failure to design cars for any time later than 1980 (even when it meant creating a brand new class of vehicle to get round fuel efficiency laws) was down to management. I had no idea the unions were so powerful.
If you mean SUVs, that "creating a brand new class of vehicle" was one of their few successes, actually making an effort to build cars they could still sell for a profit, even with the inflated per-unit costs imposed in part by the UAW. Building the smaller, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars you might prefer them to build was economically a non-starter - but the higher margins on SUVs made them viable, indeed the lifeline which kept the Big Three going until very recently. For that matter, you'll find the foreign manufacturers make them too - not because they're in on the evil conspiracy to use mind-control rays to make people endure those big luxury vehicles they don't really want, but because they were what people did want.

As for powerful - yes, of course the UAW have a chokehold on the Big Three. How many non-union plants do they have in the US? Do you have any idea just how much it controls them, down to being able to block plant closures, shift changes and personnel decisions? It's a miracle they've survived this long.