If Detroit dies, who gets the blame? Workers will point the finger at Washington, which handed Wall Street $700 billion (£469 billion) but would not agree a $14 billion bailout for carmakers that drove America’s economy forward for most of the past century.

Leo Gerard, president of the United Steel Workers union, regularly rails like an old class warrior about the way help is given to “those who shower before work – but not those who shower afterwards”. Outside Michigan’s motor manufacturing plants there is also bitterness towards trade deals signed by politicians that allowed the rich to get richer but exposed Detroit to competition from European and Far Eastern imports.

And some question the motives of Republican Senators such as Richard Shelby of Alabama who opposes the bailout, while he has big Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes-Benz plants in his state.

The free marketeers on Wall Street and in Washington prefer to blame the workers. They say the bankruptcy of some or all of the Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – has long since been overdue. Many suggest it should be welcomed as a chance to rip up the benefit deals negotiated by unions that have made US carmakers uncompetitive.

They highlight figures showing the hourly labour costs of the Big Three is above $70 an hour compared with $49 for the Japanese carmakers in the southern states.

The size of that disparity is largely attributable to legacy costs by which Detroit’s carmakers have to pay pensions and healthcare for hundreds of thousands of retired workers.

The Big Three’s burden is that they have built up obligations to a vast pool of former employees because they have been around for so much longer than their new competitors. Unions such the United Auto Workers, knowing that their survival is at stake, have agreed to pare these costs down for the next generation.

But labour accounts for only a small fraction of the price of a new car. Even if the Big Three shed all the legacy costs, it would save an average of just $800 a vehicle. They are selling cars for up to $2,500 less than Japanese competitors and still losing market share.

This indicates that if the Big Three go bust it is their bosses, insular and stuck in their ways, who should be held most responsible. Put simply, for too long they had built bad cars, which were inefficient, unreliable and unattractive and Americans did not want to buy them.

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