Not surprisingly, the changing competitive economics of the car industry have resulted in shifting production. Since 2000, motor vehicle production in the United States has dropped to 11.3 million cars and light trucks per year from 12.8 million. Mexican output has risen to 4.1 million from 1.9 million vehicles per year. That trend is likely to continue.

Detroit began to respond to these forces more than a decade ago by pushing hard to curb high pay and benefit costs. The burden of paying for lifetime health care benefits was transferred to a stand-alone trust. Rather than accept pay cuts for existing workers, the U.A.W. agreed to allow a limited number of new employees to be hired at roughly half the wages of those already working on the same assembly lines doing the same jobs.

Since then, that pay gap has been partly closed, but not surprisingly the union wants it closed faster. Meanwhile, the U.A.W. is fighting to preserve for existing workers one of the most generous health care plans in the country; its members pay only about 4 percent of their medical bills. (By comparison, workers across the country pay an average of 28 percent of their health care costs, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.)

I’m all for workers earning more, but it’s important to understand that, at least in the car industry, this is not a case of rapacious investors profiting at the expense of workers. Since its initial public offering in November 2010, G.M. stock has risen by only 13 percent, compared with 154 percent for the overall market.

We need to be realistic about these challenges. The United States government can support the auto industry with initiatives like the new trade deal with Mexico, which would require that 40 to 45 percent of the vehicle is made by workers earning at least $16 per hour. But Mr. Trump’s flowery rhetoric notwithstanding, we’ll be lucky just to keep the jobs we have now.

So we should also be talking about a subject that Mr. Trump has utterly ignored: the need to carry out policies to develop the jobs of the future. That means significant investments in education, and research and development, both of which Mr. Trump has sought to cut in his various budget proposals, while also failing to enact a desperately needed infrastructure program.

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