Reflection: Auto Workers Simulation

While I missed the class discussions and subject matter last week, the project on the auto industry was an interesting change of pace. It was current, addressing an issue that is of concern in America today, whereas our usual discussions are theoretical and many of the examples we use are historical. Dealing with specific facts and hard evidence -- that is, dealing with how the world is currently working, rather than how it ought to work or how it tends to work in the long run, was very different from the theory and hypotheticals of the different schools of IR was a major shift in the style of our class.

The simulations themselves were an interesting experience. While we had fun making our video, we had to also spend a great deal of time looking up not just information and statistics on the subject of the automotive industry and outsourcing, but information and statistics that explicitly supported our group’s (the UAW’s) stance in order to make an argument, whether we agreed with it or not, and discredit the arguments of the other groups, even if we personally agreed with them. I think that all the groups’ arguments were both compelling and narrowly tailored to the group’s interest. All of them had solid, convincing evidence, and all of them had inflated, one-sided assumptions. This seemed very natural to me. In the real world, interests often are in directly-opposed conflict with each other, with both sides giving perfectly valid arguments and both sides being biased by their viewpoints. I got the feeling that while in real life, interests groups are probably a lot slicker and heavily invested than we were, debates between interest groups and the government probably have substantial similarities to our presentations.

However, despite the highly practical, contemporary, and facts-based nature of the debate, I also noticed a thread of the liberalism/realism debate coming through in some of the different groups. The UAW argued that the US would suffer economically if they had a trade imbalance with their partners, pointing to the realist argument that relative gains are important, not just absolute gains. They also were in favor of protecting American jobs first and foremost. The AIAM on the other hand, were highly liberal, arguing that free trade between nations would give rise to a higher-quality auto industry that would benefit all consumers around the world. Constructivism also cropped up in the debate, with the Sierra Club arguing that the U.S.’s identity as a economic power with high environmental standards, as opposed to China’s identity as a massively industrial state with very low environmental standards made it reasonable to assume that the two states would act as their identities predicted, with the U.S. producing less waste and China producing a great deal.