TalkBaja.com » Baja Mexico Forums » Baja News Wire

Official: Mazda2, Mazda3 will be built at new Mexican plant - USATODAY.com

"...Mazda's official release from Japan focuses on how the plant in Salamanca, central Mexico, is aimed at "mainly" serving the Central and South American markets. Both the Mazda2 subcompact and Mazda3 compact are sold in the USA..."

This announcement does come hard on the heels of Mazda announcing that they were ceasing production of the Mazda 6 at the jointly owned facility (with Ford) in Flat Rock Michigan. The assumption was that they would be producing the 6 in Japan.

So, who knows that maybe the 6 will end up in Mexico, too.

That does seem to fly in the face of so many other foreign auto manufacturers who have opened huge manufacturing facilities in the US. Think Toyota, Honda, BMW, Hyundai,VW.

Perhaps the deal breaker for Mazda was that while virtually all of the aforementioned plants were built on Southern right ot work states, I'd venture a guess that the Flat Rock plant was UAW controlled.


Just seems to me to somewhat of a blemish of America's exceptionalism when foreign companies will build plants here and pay lower wages and provide lower benefits than they would in their own countries.

Ya might wish to check out the Ikea story as an example. Ikea opened a plant on the Carolinas where they offer substantially less in the way of benefits, vacation, retirement, and wages than they pay in Sweden. Given all the Ikea locations in the US, just how was it that they were able to successfully market in the US given the "burden" of paying their Swedish workforce waht they did. Can anyone say opportunism?

"Just seems to me to somewhat of a blemish of America's exceptionalism when foreign companies will build plants here and pay lower wages and provide lower benefits than they would in their own countries."

Not much different from most here in the US... like Apple, et al....