Striking Chrysler: The Last Waltz

There was something both exhilarating and sad about seeing picket lines outside the Daimler LLC assembly plant a few blocks from Kiko's House.

Exhilarating because it brought to this pro-labor guy's mind previous strikes – often in the dead of winter – over the years and sad because this one, which thankfully lasted a mere six hours -- was something of a last waltz before the curtain comes crashing down after 55 mostly good years.

The plant, which makes SUV dinosaurs called the Dodge Durango and Chrysler Aspen, is scheduled to shut down in 2009 as part of a massive restructuring that followed record losses in 2006 and preceded Daimler's fire sale of Chrysler to Cerebus Capital Management.

Chrysler LLC will eliminate 13,000 hourly and salaried jobs in all, or about 16 percent of its 82,500-employee global work force, leaving in the lurch 2,100 local employees and another 800 or so people who work for local suppliers.

Anyone who has had their finger on the pulse of the American automobile industry could have seen the closing coming, which kind of renders the strike irrelevant hereabouts.

While Chrysler's fortunes briefly rose after being taken over by Daimler, which makes the Mercedes brand, it shares many of the same fundamental problems as do General Motors and Ford Motors: Boring product lines that lack the sizzle and economy of the vehicles (also made in the U.S.A.) by Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers, and a failure to foresee the collapse of the SUV market and increasing demand for hybrids.

The Chrysler fleet of flashy and derivative pimpmobile stylings that seem like caricatures of themselves has seemed especially out of step to me.

Our local plant remained open as long as it did because of its reputation for building vehicles with fewer assembly-line defects. Too bad that the guys with the big offices in Detroit forgot how to design and sell them.

Photo by Robert Craig/Wilmington (Del.) News Journal