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End of the road:

After Detroit, the wreck of an American dream

By Ben Austen

Bill Londrigan was a researcher with the AFL-CIO’s building-trades division when, in 1986, Toyota broke ground for its first fully owned U.S. assembly plant, on a tract of Kentucky farmland twelve miles north of Lexington. Honda and Nissan had recently opened their own non-union facilities in the United States, and organized labor feared the consequences of losing further ground in the auto industry. Londrigan was part of the contingent sent from Washington to prevail upon Toyota to hire union builders; he ended up staying on in the Bluegrass Region, and in 1999 he was elected president of Kentucky’s AFL-CIO. When I visited Londrigan late last winter at the union’s state offices—two rooms in a storefront three miles from downtown Frankfort—he flipped across his desk a booklet that he had prepared for the battle with Toyota two decades earlier. The pamphlet detailed the scope of the vertically integrated supply chains, called keiretsu, that Japanese car companies had brought with them to America from Japan and that some believe violate U.S. antitrust laws. On its cover was a black dragon hovering ominously above the middle United States. Londrigan guided me to a specific passage and then began to read it aloud. “The euphoric welcome Japanese keiretsu factories receive when they announce their locations in American towns and counties is reminiscent of the Trojans’ joy when they first viewed the Trojan Horse. The historical warning that sad episode produced—‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’—seems to be lost on this generation of Americans, or has at least escaped the attention of U.S. economic development officials.”

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SEE ALSO: Aims and objectives; Automobile industry and trade; Automobile industry workers; Londrigan, Bill; Blue collar workers; Career as president of Kentucky AFL-CIO; Career as Toyota managing officer; Conglomerate corporations; Corporate culture; Labor unions; Scott County; St. Angelo, Steve

Response: October 2009, page 4

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