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This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a step in identifying a more accurate economic history of deindustrialization. Following the extension of the timeline of deindustrialization and its divorce from the 1970s, this article examines the reasons for production facility relocation our of Detroit, prior to the 1970s. Given that the process of deindustrialization occurred prior to 1970, the reasons must be reevaluated. To this end, this article examines one of the lesser investigated reasons that auto corporations moved their production facilities out of Detroit; organized labor. It shows that organized labor was one of the driving factors of production facility relocation. This article makes use of multiple collections housed in the Reuther Archives at Wayne State University in relation to organized labor, as well as union density data. This article details how and why production facilities were pushed out of Detroit in an effort to evade organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]