We’ve been watching a car crash unfold here over the last few days, as the future of General Motors was decided. Or at least, the short-term future.
I’m posting this from southern Ontario, where in fairness thousands of jobs currently depend on the American auto industry.
As it happens, this is also the homeland of the Iroquois
people, whose Great Law requires that “in every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations”.
Looking at the long-term, 150-200 year impact of your actions and decisions, is surely the essence of sustainability. Sadly, that’s not how the decisions about General Motors were reached this weekend.
GM, remember, is the company that gave us the Hummer.
The good news is that GM will no longer make Hummers as part of its “reinvention” as a “leaner, greener ([sic], faster and stronger” company. The bad news is that some other company has bought the brand, and clearly believes there is a future in gas-guzzling tanks.
Time was, people used to say that ‘what is good for General Motors, is good for America ‘. Actually, that’s a misquote. But understandable, given how central the motor car was to the American dream for the last 100 years.
The question now should be, as the Iroquois would ask, what about the next 100 years.
But governments here are looking, at best, to the next couple of years. They’ve agreed to pump billions into GM in a bid to save jobs, and presumably in the belief that this 20th-century dinosaur can be turned around, and in no time at all. This despite the competition from more efficient Japanese imports, and the competition that will soon be coming from the new Chinese and Indian car industries.
In the run-up to the bankruptcy decision, I wondered if there was any chance that GM might actually be sacrificed? After all, a number of banks have been let fail over the last couple of years, something that would have been unthinkable a few years before.
But while banks may be essential to the financial system, the American car industry employs far more people, and more voters.
I may not know much about cars, the auto industry and mega restructuring deals, but I do know that North America’s 20th-century car industry is not a sustainable future.
