America's Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States by Timothy J. Minchin (review)

Many historians—such as the late, great Judith Stein—have lamented that the United States traded manufacturing for finance in the 1970s. But while Detroit has languished, foreign-owned automakers have opened more than a dozen plants since 1977, extending the nation's automotive manufacturing basket from the Great Lakes region into the Deep South. In America's Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States, prolific southern labor historian Timothy J. Minchin offers seven case studies of these massive new assembly shops, chronologically describing a Japanese, German, and Korean wave. While other social scientists have studied the trend, America's Other Automakers is the first book-length examination by a historian. Minchin wants to correct a rosy success narrative of these plants by critically interrogating why automakers selected particular sites in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia and what effects these assembly plants had on their communities.

Though each case study is thickly detailed, Minchin sees a similar pattern. Regarding site selection, Minchin argues that while incentive packages and anti-union state laws and political cultures were important, other factors proved crucial: proximity to interstate highways and consumer markets, sufficient labor markets, and human connections. Governors especially played key roles in closing the deal with firms' decision makers. Despite the crowing rhetoric of the booster class, Minchin argues that communities have had more ambivalent experiences. While workers enjoyed wage premiums, they also usually got long hours and injuries from repetitive motions. While some locals benefited from economic renewal, others lamented congestion from commuters and transplants. Everyone remained on edge, worried that the industrial mobility that brought jobs to their swath of the South implied that those industries might well leave for Mexico or elsewhere—a dominant concern that clouded the efforts of the United Auto Workers (UAW) to unionize the plants.

In building these case studies, America's Other Automakers ably examines the perspective of management, state officials, unions, unorganized workers, and broader local communities. Minchin mines state archives, especially governors' papers, as well as UAW records. He combines these sources with news accounts, trade and union publications, and eighty-eight original interviews, which seem to offer more color than analytical value to Minchin's account.

What is southern about this story? Minchin mentions continuities of southern history in terms of state payroll buying through unseemly giveaway packages as well as management's appetite for the region's low-wage labor and anti-union politics. But he notes that many nonsouthern states offered similar features, and he generally shies away from framing his narrative as a particularly southern story. Minchin's close attention to the UAW's efforts to unionize these plants—starting with Honda in Ohio—suggests its failures were overdetermined by a lack of union resources, by poor strategy, and especially by savvy firm resistance in a hostile national environment for labor. He does not center southern labor cultures or politicians' anti-union demagoguery that historians have used to explain the struggles of campaigns such as Operation Dixie.

America's Other Automakers should be an opening salvo from southern historians of all stripes interrogating how these auto factories reshaped the region, from politics to culture. Labor and business historians could study the emerging network of adjacent auto-parts supply chains or contextualize these failed unionization efforts with those in airplane manufacturing, big-box retail, and Amazon warehouses. Researchers might examine how German, Japanese, and Korean managers and workers altered local and state culture and politics, whether around immigration policy, food, or religion. The southern view of U.S. economic history reminds us that manufacturing still mattered after the 1970s.