I suggest this article is worth the read, regardless of what side of the issue one happens to be on.

Full Story:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/bu...ss&oref=slogin

 

I live in Georgetown (5 minutes from the Camry plant), and I can tell you that this town does not exist solely because of it. While I do not work for Toyota, many of my friends do. We have gotten many, many new restaurants and stores because of the growth...and there are probably no less than 8 new subdivisions sprouting up all over town--one of them in which I live.

With that said, another huge driver of growth for this town has been the migration of people and families OUT of Lexington city limits. It is much cheaper to live here, and it has far less hassles. It now takes me half the time to travel to work compared to when I actually lived in Lexington. Georgetown has basically become the largest suburb of Lexington...

 

The reason they want a place that hasn't had manufacturing is because the wages and benefit packages they offer are smaller than they were traditionally, among other reasons.

 

It's the same thing that happens in any area where a small city is taken over by its first automaker voyage.

It has nothing to do with Toyota.

Ask the people of St Therese what they though of GM a decade ago versus today. It's just more popular to take a domestic company and use an end of a cycle with a city and offset it with a newly developing city that otherwise wouldnt recieve headline unless Toyota moves in.

I'm curous as to what Toyota's recent investment and the citys population growth in the last 20-years have to do with each other. Sounds to me like the city didn't Need Toyota but rather Toyota needed the city.

 

I would suggest that any small town in which any auto manufacturer drops a plant would see a significant boom....this is not a huge revelation.

Lordstown, OH is on the map basically because of GM assembly (no offense Darth ). Bowling Green, KY is Corvette. There are many more examples.

The tone of the article (from the NY Times, surprise surprise) seems to echo your constant drumbeat Robert.....the traditional American auto industry is dying, GM and Ford are no longer American anyway, but luckily we have the great and generous benefactor, Toyota (and Nissan), around to keep America thriving.

 

X 2

I only skimmed a little bit of the article, but that is exactly what I expected (it's the NY Times, after all), and what I picked up from what I did see.

:blah:

 

Typical NY Times pro-Toyota anti-Detroit spin. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that the town and it's people are doing well, but the headline bothers me:

"What Toyota Has Done for Georgetown, KY; What the International Auto Industry Has Done for Small Town America"

OK, what about what GM (and Ford) has done for all of America - like providing a pretty good living - and a pretty good retirement - for whole generations of Americans. The NY Times would never do an article saying "Can GM be saved after all they've done for America?" It would be "GM: Fat, lazy irrelevant, polluting company falls off map, no one cries."

HAZ-Matt has it dead on.

 

More Toyota nuthugging, go figure.

 

I would like to point out that Bowling Green is not a good example, as it is most certainly NOT just a Corvette manufacturing town.

The plan runs 1 shift a day. Bowling Green is a city of 50,000+ People, with a majorly trafficked interstate highway and a, 18,000 student state University (where I went to school actually).

That town has been booming for years and the Corvette plant, although significant, is far from the be-all for the city. The automotive industry in general is big in Bowling Green, but its not all Corvette related.

 

A-frickin'-men.

 

What is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that's a bad thing or just makeing an (accurate) observation?

If a worker in Georgetown is willing to work for less than a worker in Detroit or (some other city where there is/has been a lot of the same kind of jobs) I don't see that as bad or good...it is what it is.

Should an employee in Georgetown receive the same salary/benefits package as a worker doing the same job in say, Buffalo, NY even if the COL in Buffalo is 1.5 times that of Georgetown? I'd say no and I suspect most companies would say no.

I doubt there is a single company in the U.S. who doesn’t adjust the wages/salaries they offer for their jobs taking into consideration the geographic location/market conditions of the location the job is in.

I also doubt that there is any company looking build a facility in the U.S. who doesn’t compare the wages they need to pay workers in one potential location vs. another location (and that includes GM and Ford). I don’t know this for certain but I suspect that GM didn’t locate the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, TN just because they liked the picturesque landscape – I’m sure the wage package they needed to offer there vs. one in the North East was a significant factor (and that the package they offer in Spring Hill is lower than they would have had to offer elsewhere).

Each person deciding what salary/benefits package they are willing to work for is about as basic a form of free enterprise as exists and it's a good thing; regardless of whether one likes or hates Toyota.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to put down Bowling Green....it's just that, when I think of Bowling Green, Kentucky I think of Corvette (I'm sure everyone outside of Kentucky who knows where Corvette is built feels the same way).

The article is most definitely slanted to make it look like Toyota is the savior/champion of small-town, Apple Pie America and the Detroit automakers don't offer anyone anything. It couldn't be a more biased pile of rubbish.

 

What is the article supposed to say to not be "biased" against the Detroit automakers - should it say everything is just great and business is booming in Livonia regardless of what's actually happening?

I don't see any great love of Toyota in the article nor any lothing of Ford/GM either.

 

Georgetown is also right off a major interstate, I-75, and I doubt it would have been selected by Toyota if it weren't. Also of interest: the Cincinnati Bengals have held their training camp in Georgetown from '97 through at least next season, practicing at Toyota Stadium of Georgetown College. That also provides a lift, albeit smaller.

 

The article is biased because they don't just talk about "international" corporations helping small town America and leave it at that....no, they just can't resist taking a swipe at metropolitan Detroit and not even mentioning the good things that our companies right here do, and have been doing for 70, 80+ years, for the same type of small towns.

I don't even know why they chose Livonia....Livonia is a middle-class Detroit suburb that was recently ranked in the top 50 safest cities in America. GM and Ford are major employers, yes. But trust me from someone who lives in the area, Livonia is far from blight-stricken.

If they wanted to prove a point against the Big 3, they should've used Flint. "Buick City" as it was known in its hayday has really sunk into the depths since GM moved out....