About the time Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi was leaving Ann Arbor on her whirlwind book promotion tour, press releases were issued by Ford’s Automotive Components Holdings (ACH) unit and Johnson Controls that the sale of the local interior components plant in Saline from ACH to JCI had collapsed.  And for the small town just south of the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor, that is trouble with a capital “T”, as the plant is the town’s largest employer and source of tax revenue with about 1,700 employees.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark, as Speaker Pelosi had to gavel the Congress closed so she could flog her important and highly anticipated book “Know Your Power”, leaving all of America in the lurch as gasoline prices still hover at near record levels, $3.85 a gallon locally at the moment.  What was the reason for the collapse of the talks between ACH and JCI?  As reported in the Ann Arbor News, ACH in a statement said, “Higher gasoline prices, weakness in the housing industry and slumping market for trucks and SUV’s made negotiations increasingly difficult.”  In other words, Ford could not guarantee certain minimum volumes for the plant given the sharp collapse of truck sales, Ford’s signature product.  Without such guarantees, potential buyers will not buy such plants, which are saddled with high fixed costs due to union representation.  Without a relatively high floor of business, the plants ACH is trying to sell cannot be expected to be profitable, even given the recent progress in labor costs due to buyouts and extensive use of “temporary” workers (about 600 workers at Saline are UAW, with 850 temporary and the balance as salaried).