Daniel Akerson: How to Fix American Manufacturing

It’s going to take a combination of innovation, which leads to productivity gains, and new ways of helping labor understand the challenges that a company faces in the marketplace. For example, we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past by burdening ourselves with structural costs that aren’t flexible and aren’t manageable. Do we want a bonus- and profit-sharing plan with the union? That’s a different construct and something that they wouldn’t have listened to 10 or 20 years ago. You have to look for new business-industrial relations and different types of compensation practices.

Look at what the union did at Lake Orion, where General Motors and the United Auto Workers agreed to lower wages so the company could make subcompacts profitably in the U.S. That’s a case of a good and healthy industrial relationship that would have been unheard of prior to the bankruptcy.