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A howl is arising among conservatives, and David Brooks throws back his head this morning — the Big three auto makers must be allowed to die.
Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth.
PanAm, union airline. Southwest, non-union. We get it.
It’s amazing that even now Brooks cannot name the pig he is tasked with lipsticking, he must speak in conservative code. He never says the UAW needs to be broken, instead we’re treated to "politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state."
At least the Wall Street Journal is more forthright:
Detroit’s demands are meanwhile pressing in a postelection environment where Big Labor and greens are presenting their own bills for political services rendered.
There were no labor union folks on Obama’s transition council of economic advisors. Wanting people to keep their jobs and the healthcare protection they earned from a lifetime of work, and not foot the bill for poor corporate management, is not exactly a demand for "payola."
Here’s more Republican honesty:
“The financial straits that the Big Three find themselves is not the product of our current economic downturn, but instead is the legacy of the uncompetitive structure of its manufacturing and labor force,” said U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).
As Marcy notes, Shelby’s anti-union carping may have more to do with the fact that his state is home to the non-union auto factories of Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes that crank out SUVs and giant pickups.
McConnell supported easing access to the $25 billion loan to the auto industry that Congress made earlier this year, largely because the loan was made to encourage fuel economy and environmental standards. But yesterday, Chris Dodd said it probably wouldn’t happen because they can’t get any Republican cooperation (though Reid and Levin, it should be noted, quickly yanked his chain).
I guess the GOP is now fighting about who they’d like to screw over more in the waning days of the Bush administration — the environmentalists or the unions.
Well, at least we know where David Brooks comes down.
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Zed! Hi Jane
here’s a complete list of the 17 members of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board:
Good morning. Could we talk about health care in the countries that compete with Detroit in auto manufacturing? Absent the cost of health care, would we be able to lower prices?
Of course, we would have to, from henceforth also, make some fuel efficient cars, also.
Unfortunately, big corps with unions & unions combined to make the industries completely disfunctional. I’m thinking mainly of steel & autos. (Can you imagine the clunker you’d be driving around in if there were no foreign competition.) In other words, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Unlike some other well known R memes (e.g., it’s all Fannie’s & Freddie’s fault), where there is evidence to sort it out, that cannot be done in some high profile union industries.
So it will be all heat & no light.
good morning, what’s cooking today?
May my home-boy Walter Reuther forgive me, but I think that the UAW dying might not be the worst thing that could happen.
I have family members who work at the Toyota plant in Buffalo, WV, and there’s a reason why there’s not much effort to unionize there: they treat their employees pretty well. The pay is good, the benefits are good, etc…
The UAW has lost it’s way as much as GM, Ford, et al, has, IMO.
okay, i need some help here. why is defacto union busting a BAD thing? what is wrong with a do over from the ground up?
careful you will be labeled a union buster. :)
they use the oposite of their position to make their points, they make believe they are for one thing when they are clearly against it
union ALLOWS the laborer to compete with the industry for the worth of their position
goods that come in to this country without unions must be tariffed, plain and simple
they are taking everything that went wrong in this country, (the demonization of unions) and trying to use their mistakes to make things even worse
Thanks Jane.
digg
except that even tho they are non-union, the pressure of unions is what gives the employees at the Toyota plants better wages and benefits than they would ever get if there were no unions.
totally disagree
blaming the union is the same thing as blaming the provider of plastic
the unions simply broker the deal to provide a good, the corporation brokers a deal they need to make money
if the deal is bad it has nothing to do with the union, it is entirely the fault of the industry that brokered that deal
this is the same thing as me charging 5 dollars for a radio and the person buying it tries to sell it for 4 dollars.
this has absolutely nothing to do with the unions, the industry has to broker a deal that they can make money with
and then this country cannot allow products into this country that come from countries that do not allow unions or collective bargaining
exactly. the threat of unionization is a benefit for many who have never belonged to a union (or had to pay dues, etc).
But the First Dood is a union guy. I thought the R’s were suddenly big union fans!
sorry, can’t go along with the blameless scenario.
I’m hoping the UAW provides the address of BoBo Brooks to all of their union members. In the event of the U.S. auto industry crashing Bobo can expect the knock on his door of 3-5 million unemployed workers.
Toyota makes cars that people want to buy. GM, et. al., don’t.
Why are unions even in this discussion?
OT – on cspan now: treasury’s kashkari is now giving his opening statement to kuchinich’s subcommittee (hearing on tarp – details at oxdown).
There can be excesses on both sides but bargaining cannot occur on a level playing field if the workers cannot speak with one voice. Look what happened with the butchers at Walmart. Would the screen writers been able to reach a successful resolution if they had been operating individually?
it’s bc dems want a lb of flesh, i think. everyone rode this horse into the ground. public/gov’t too. i say start over.
I disagree, Elliot. The Japanese have a different social contract model than Americans do just like they have a different, and better, sense of what’s worthwhile. That’s the reason why Toyota has been whippin’ ass for years.
It’s not the union’s fault that GM made the Escalade and Ford made the Excursion. Hell, I used to drive a Geo Prism that was literally a Toyota Corolla with a different logo. Which one do you see on the road now? Why is that?
But the union has it’s own problems. The anecdotes of workers sitting in the workplace version of study hall are true, and absolutely absurd.
The UAW went too far and probably cannot find it’s way back.
All unions do not operate in the same way.
oh, jeeze – kashkari is extolling the virtues of the HOPE program, which we just heard on wednesday was a complete failure.
Oy. I see we’ve got a lot of work to do here.
Hope someone asks Kashkari how much he paid for the suit he is wearing. My guess, $2,500-3,500.
I am going to rephrese this question:
Why are unions universally assumed to be a good thing?
I grew up listening to my granddad talk about the UAW thugs who threw him out of his valued job at Ford. Now my grandad was a cantankerous SOB, to be sure. But he got along well enough for 11 years before the unions came to power. And he did OK as a self-employed handyman and gardener after leaving Ford. He was a hard worker with little patience for those who were not.
There was a time in the early 70s when Detroit was still awash with Defense dollars and everyone wanted 2 big new cars every year or two, when unions (undeerstandably) wanted a larger piece of the awesome pie.
But when the pie became less awesome, the fact is that unions and management failed workers and shareholders alike because they could play the blame game and both sides had enough clout to get Federal support for their ends.
This disfunctional environment made the industry uncompetitive more than either side.
In the end the entire region pays the price.
I’m going to ask that you give sources on statements like that.
Can you prove that union members are sitting on their hands in the auto plants and that this is causing their problems?
My very strong suspicion is that will change as the UAW’s influence fades.
No one wants to bail anyone out, but
LurchPaulson is letting bankers keep the bonuses (and salaries) they receive. TARP artificially inflates the value of their stock options. It’s the contrast between the white collar thugs skimming the cream so they can SAVE OUR COUNTRY CLUBS, and the armageddon this could be for the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and others.On the one hand the Wall Street bond holders of the mortgage backed securities refuse to allow the government to write down the value of the mortgages. On the other hand, by refusing to help the Big 2.5 to transition to sustainability (that’s what we want, not a bailout), they’re driving up the foreclosure rate.
That’s going to cause another deflationary ripple through the economy. Everyone keeps asking if we’ve hit “bottom.” Losing the single largest part of our manufacturing base just pushes the bottom lower.
Once you lose key skill sets, such as tool and die, they’re gone. We’ll be dependent on foreign trades for the forseeable future.
Short Kashkari:
We’ve come a long way but we have a long way yet to go.
Much appreciated.
Kucinich is on the case.
Disturbing, isn’t it?
I’m for bailing everyone out, run the federal deficit up another trillion, then transition to the green economy. It will all right itself again in 5 to 8 years.
(easy for me to say).
Wall Street is a de facto union. Except WE pay their dues….and pay…and pay..and pay….
The UAW has had problems no question, but unions are an unquestionable good thing.
When unions are strong, so is the middle class. When unions are weak, the money flows to the top. It’s pretty simple.
People on the left have absorbed a lot of right wing propaganda about union workers that just isn’t true. So if people want to have a discussion about problems within the labor movement, that’s a worthwhile conversation to have — but be prepared to back your statements up with links, and be careful about slinging anecdotal stories that you can’t back up.
for those interested, Jane’s got another post up, but don’t let that stop this conversation.
Sisyphus
Is the quality thing a function of the worker or of the management. BTW the big Toyota SUV gets the same gas mileage as a Hummer.
don’t get me wrong. unions have done a great service for the working class. i just believe NOW is the time to re think the relationship. that’s all. i don’t take part in tit for tat stories. waste of my time.
kucinich is doing a great job.
BTW
not to worry. work with me on this.
Unions are democratic institutions. Corporations are authoritarians institutions.
Having just returned from China where among other places I visited Longmen Grottoes, where caves were first carved into the rock and more than 100,000 Buddhist images then carved into the walls of the caves, a project that took nearly 600 years, and saw the tablets of Yunju Temple, onto which the entire Buddhist Tripitaka was carved into stone, a project that took more than a thousand years, I’m not feeling too kindly at the moment toward the management of the Detroit car companies who have stubbornly resisted all attempts to get them to think about the inevitable future and the consequences their decisioins have for our country.
Are we supposed to believe they’d have a planning horizon not measured in milliseconds if only they weren’t unionized? Or that that’s the reason Toyota, for example, was willing invest in developing the Prius and then initially sell them at a loss in order to build the market for them? Detroit’s total lack of vision is the fault of … unions?
I don’t think so.
i like it. you are in charge now.
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many moons ago (before the break up of the bell system), my dad used to have to participate in the (i think) every 3 years negotiations with cwa on the side of management.
i can remember (i was just a little kid) telling me how he was (silently) on the side of the union. he explained it by saying that the things the union wanted: good pensions, good healthcare, vacation time, etc were all things that he would get too if the union succeeded in their negotiations.
exactly, nothin wrong with just being decent to workers.it pays off in the end.
Bullseye.
Incidentally, many government workers are unionized.Are they to blame for BUSHCO and the policies of the last eight years?Are they the next heads on the anti-union guillotine?
He certainly is. Not taking any bs from Kashkari.
Has anyone heard Kucinich’s name in the rumor mills for a cabinet post?
the blame lies with those brokering the deal and america allowing product in this country from countries without collective bargaining for their labor force
yes, a union can broker a counter productive deal, it is usually in the best interest of a union to insure the company can still turn a profitable product
if they make it impossible to turn a profit that is a counter productive deal for both the union and the laborer
but sometimes products cannot be produced profitably, this is the case when a product comes in to this country from outher countries that allow slave, child labor or allow the industry to defer their costs, ie, pollute the air
12,000 paid not to work. Big 3 and suppliers pay billions to keep downsized UAW members on payroll in decades-long deal.
Sorry, Jane, but that’s a HUGE problem.
“I guess the GOP is now fighting about who they’d like to screw over more in the waning days of the Bush administration — the environmentalists or the unions.”
Is this is sophistic misdirection in order to deviously garner support for bailouts which would mean whopping bonuses for the most incompetent/dishonest managers in America or bottom-ine preference for union members over other working stiffs? Perhaps, it’s just your way of saying the issue and what to do about it doesn’t matter as much as pummeling Republicans and David Brooks?
When my friend in London was considering taking a new job, and I found out what the salary was, I said “Can you live on that?” He said “of course.” I shared that over here we have to consider the bite that health insurance takes out of our paycheck. He said “our taxes pay for healthcare.” I said “our taxes pay for war.”
Why is it acceptable, and even shrewed, for people to band together and form a corporation for the benefit of its members, yet others wanting to band together to form a union for the benefit of its members are frowned upon.
Labor without the benefit of unions is removed from democracy–it is a take it or leave it proposition. Labor with the benefit of unions involves voting, which is the foundation of democracy.
There are multiple complaints to be lodged on both sides of this issue, but fundamentally union members reign in excessive executive compensation where congress cannot. Include in this worker safety and one can easily see the benefits of unions, even in non-unionized companies.
I do not want to give the impression that I am especially anti-union any more than I am anti-democratic. But not all unions are alike, and not all employers are alike. In fact, I believe that progress and justice require checks and balances, in the public and private sector.
And much like the whole health care mess, there is plenty of blame to go around in Detroit.
I’ll stay out of the annecdotal mode (it’s just too easy to fall into being that it is my home town)
For monetary wonks and others.
Check out the stuff under ‘Economic Data- FRED’ ( menu bar). Way, way over my head, but I’m sure some-one/lots of someones :) here will find it useful.
‘The Research Division’s goal is to promote quality economic research and contribute to economic policy discussions while expanding the frontier of economic knowledge around the globe in the areas of money and banking, macroeconomics, and international and regional economics.’
http://research.stlouisfed.org/
yes, gov’t is in the mix as well but to coin a rummy phrase “it is what it is”. let’s make something new out of this opportunity.
Yeah, I’m not trying to “Union Bust” here, but I heard that some fellow just won a contest by talking about “Change”, and to me, it means that we have to look past ideology to what REALLY works and what doesn’t, and obviously Detroit isn’t working.
The UAW is absolutely part of the problem. But the UMWA isn’t part of the problem. The ILGWU isn’t part of the problem. God bless them and may they continue to serve their members, their industry, and their country for many more years to come. The UAW, however…
Like I said yesterday, if Shelby want to crow in a non-union direction for his state’s selfish interests, he can crow as long as his state pays the unemployment benefits, health benefits and retirement benefits of those states’ budgets which will be greatly harmed by the loss of the big 2.5.
So from my perspective, in regards to Shelby, it IS about payola but of a different kind. Payola for other states to stay just above water. But, Shelby knows those states went in a political direction he did not approve of this election cycle. He’s just playing a mean, cruel type of partisan politics cloaked in economics. He has no interest in the overall state of the nation in terms of how he is talking. Shelby is playing “payola back” time.
In other, more Democratic countries, in Europe in particular the unions are far stronger than they are here and they still seem to be able to make automobiles and other products that people want at a reasonable price. Management in this country has been inefficient, greedy and downright hostile to workers and, believe you me, it is not the worker on the line that has created the bloody mess we are in now. The biggest problem we have is the health care system that is the most expensive, one of the least effective and is being run by insurance companies not medical professionals. We need to get rid of the insurance companies, they are totally non-productive and live only to squeeze as much money out f the public as they can.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. Capital has organized for years.Why shouldn’t labor? Levels out the playing field.
Boy, you got that riht! I’d like to see some serious renegotiating of trade deals that are all give and no get for the U.S.Maybe some tariffs and quotas on imports,too!
awesome
That is a 3 year old link that tells only a small, distorted portion of the story with no mention of where things are today.
The Jobs Bank was started to give union workers whose jobs were having to implement technology that would ultimately put them out of a job. While there were certainly problems with the way it was administered, the alternative was putting them out on the street.
I welcome the discussion but let’s not go for three strikes here.
I agree wholeheartedly, but for the purposes of this discussion, we have to separate the worker from union officials.
I’m not saying that the worker who sat in the job bank is the problem, I’m saying that the knuckleheads who came up with the idea and implemented it should not have a seat at the 21st century bargaining table.
Universal health care is by far a better solution to most of the problems discussed here today than unions for union’s sake.
Wait a minute….Southwest Airlines IS unionized, and is one of the most heavily unionized airlines in the nation. That said, they have had only one strike in their history, by the dispatchers in 1974, and it was short. No union has taken action against them since then, and according to Wikipedia, the workforce is 87% unionized.
A lot of the reason why Southwest has been so successful is that they developed a corporate culture of “we’re all in this together” from the beginning. Work rules are flexible, with an eye more towards efficient operation rather than draconian observation. Basically, they have taken care of their employees from the beginning.
I spent a week “inside” Southwest for a magazine article, which is why I have some knowledge of this!
What does “three strikes” mean?
When the Charleston, WV AT&T Call Center closed – after years of valiant effort to prevent it by Sen. Rockefeller – my ex-wife was given 1 year’s severance pay, 18 months of continued health insurance, and 2 years of paid schooling to retrain for another job.
That’s how it’s done, not the “Jobs Bank” way.
And it seems to me that things that were done 3 years ago might be having an effect today. Just saying.
Sorry I missed this thread, looks like the pro-union side could have used some help.
FYI, selise, Bonior is Chair of American Rights at Work, so there is at least someone who has union workers’ backs on that team.
What do I think of when I think of “unions”? The airlines, public education and the auto industry. All three, even with the aid of government, struggle to meet the steep demands of mediocrity and more often than not fail.
I am of the opinion of letting the ‘Big 3′ crash & burn and restructure without unions. If they hand my tax dollars to these companies while the UAW still has its finger in the pie, I will not buy another car from them.
thanks! i did not know that. still not a big fan of the list though.
I know I’m waaay late to this game but I had to say thank you, Jane, for this post. My dad and my brother were upper Ford management and my husband is a UAW member. I could go on and on about the poor business plans of the Big 3 but the unions are not responsible for that. And the health care? My husband is 51 and because of his job he has had knee surgery, neck surgery, and just had his second hip replaced (no one in his family has any bone problems or joint problems). The workers need really good health care because they are truly damaged physically getting their jobs done.