In his WSJ column today, Holman Jenkins writes about the decision by Toyota to close its plant in California called “NUMMI” (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.). NUMMI was, Jenkins explains, a joint Toyota-General Motors venture dating back to 1984 as a way of commingling Japanese auto production efficiency with the UAW, that bastion of inefficiency.
It never worked out for Toyota since, Jenkins writes, “Even in recent years, Nummi employed twice as may workers as it really needed.” Toyota’s decision wins Jenkins’ praise for “hard-headed unwillingness to keep playing sugar daddy to the UAW.”
The union has tried all sorts of political maneuvers to keep the plant open. Toyota doesn’t want to keep paying for inefficiency, so American taxpayers should be compelled to.
As Bastiat wrote, the state is the great fiction whereby everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense. The UAW (and other unions) would have the government keep supporting them at taxpayer expense indefinitely. The taxpayers are pretty much captives, but investors can and will go elsewhere. More and more UAW members are discovering that the union’s short-sighted antagonism to efficiency has cost them their jobs.
