Chrysler Should Have Followed Road Map for Success to Poland

The United Auto Worker and Canadian Auto Worker unions were equally shortsighted. All they required were job security and relatively high production wages in a rapidly changing global automotive industry that could offer neither.

Meanwhile, many of DaimlerChrysler's rivals had found central and eastern Europe -- good talent for little money, the perfect recipe for developing highly competitive, very desirable products to take sales and market share from DaimlerChrysler and its Chrysler Group in North America and everywhere else in the world.

It's a brutal business.

But sitting here in the capital seat of Lower Silesia, I get the impression that neither the UAW, the CAW nor the Chrysler executives left in place by Chrysler's prospective new owner, private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, fully appreciate the reality of their situation.

For example, there is Chrysler chief executive Thomas W. LaSorda telling journalists in Auburn Hills, Mich., that all of Chrysler's brands -- Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler -- "are staying together . . . and will not be broken up under any circumstances."

There are the leaders of the UAW and CAW telling their well-paid members, certainly by global standards, that they will not lose jobs in a fire-sale corporate sellout, a relatively paltry $7.45 billion for a company originally bought by Daimler-Benz for $36 billion, engineered by a private-equity firm known for cutting jobs and breaking up and selling off the most lucrative pieces of the companies it acquires.

LaSorda and the union chiefs have the temerity to say these things in a world where the rest of the auto industry is taking advantage of what is being offered by central and eastern Europe to help do them in.

Their expressed optimism is as believable as the "merger of equals" nonsense put forth by Eaton and Schrempp nine years ago. It's baloney.