Detroit’s Downturn: It’s the Productivity, Stupid
There has been a lot of finger-pointing about who has put the American auto industry in a ditch, sending it hat in hand to the taxpayers’ ostensible representatives in Washington. There seems to be a broad consensus that Detroit’s problems were caused by inept and arrogant management, unimaginative car design, poor quality — though this has improved somewhat over the past couple of decades — and overpaid union workers. While there is less agreement on how much to weigh each of these factors, only the latter is attributed to the UAW. There also seems to be some dispute over what their compensation actually is, but most agree that it’s uncompetitive with the foreign transplants, largely in the south, though Honda builds cars in Ohio. Of course, the fact that the non-union companies are in the south has resulted in predictable accusations that southern Republicans are playing politics and trying to destroy the union to the benefit of their home-state companies — ignoring the fact that General Motors has a plant in Tennessee, the home state of the most prominent bailout opponent, Senator Bob Corker.
The UAW is seen to have been the winner of the current round because, while the Senate Republicans held up the Congressional bailout to them (though it should be noted that their votes weren’t necessary to pass it — only to provide political cover to the Democrats, who had sufficient Republican votes to push it through), the White House capitulated and seems on the brink of offering them the money anyway.
But almost all of the discussion, when it comes to UAW culpability, has been on wages. The even larger issue, though, is the elephant in the room that seemingly no one discusses, even when given a political opportunity. For instance, I saw a “debate” on Fox News recently in which the Democrat defending the union said that it was partly management’s fault because of the poor quality of the cars, and the Republican failed to respond. And it’s not like people are unaware of it, at least people familiar with the industry. The issue isn’t wages — though those are a problem — so much as work rules. UAW work rules, which have evolved over the many decades since the passage of the Wagner Act, are the biggest reason that General Motors is uncompetitive with its non-union American counterparts.
What are work rules? They are agreements negotiated in the contract between management and the union covering how the employees are to be classified, how many breaks they get, how much time off they get, who can do which jobs, how discipline is to be enforced, etc. The goal of the rules is not to enhance productivity or production quality. It is to provide opportunities for featherbedding, increase numbers of (overpaid) jobs for union workers, and minimize how much they have to actually work. This is important because it’s at least in theory possible that the industry could be making money even at current wages, if they could be provided with the flexibility to increase worker productivity. When you blame management for the quality and cost problems in the auto industry, first consider stories like this:
As a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.
To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard-earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short-sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long-term sustainability.
The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. …
I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours’ pay. They could easily load one-third more rail cars and still maintain their union-negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should “not be naive.”
One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to labor relations for assistance. As a twenty-five-year-old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The labor relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.
Rand Simberg’s superb article should not have to be written. By all rights, it should bore people to death. Unfortunately, the MSM rarely reports on the often disgraceful behavior of UAW members. Most Americans are unfamiliar with the ongoing nonsense. And yes, the well meaning Wagner Act greatly contributed to the auto industry’s decline. The practical result of the legislation prevented the auto makers from becoming more efficient. The added costs were inevitably passed along to the consumers. The UAW hurts the typical American. It is only concerned with benefiting it membership. Everybody else is played for a fool.
Eh, cedarford says we should pass a big, fat tariff and everything would be all better.
“To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard-earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers.”
Hmmmm…you could replace UAW, with the acronym NEA, CWA and a host of others…the actions and the results- would still be the same.
When I was going to college, I worked at the Budd plant (now defunct) in Detroit one summer, and was absolutely amazed at the inefficiency. I always seemed to get done with my daily quota of widgets about 3-4 hours into my shift. I didn’t think I was working that hard, but apparently I was since everybody told me to slow down – if I kept doing that, it would make them look bad. I always wondered how many fewer people it would take to have the same output.
Yesterday one of the networks ran a story that 75% of the materials used in building a car is purchased from outside sources. The point being, if the automakers aren’t bailed out, all these contributing businesses go under also. Why isn’t anybody asking these businesses to also take some cuts? If they are contingent on the auto industry to stay afloat, will their workers make some sacrifices to keep their jobs? Will the businesses reduce the prices they charge the Big 3 in order to have a market for their materials? If the job loss will be trickle down, why aren’t the sacrifice and concessions also trickling down? If everybody gave up a little, from the UAW retirees to the guy mixing paint that is sold to GM, maybe they could pull themselves out of this and not expect taxpayers that make less per hour and have less benefits and retirement perks pick up the tab.
My first accounting job out of college was at a paper mill in Maine. Even the offices were unionized, and what a inefficient pain in the ass. Work rules drove us crazy. For example, since I was salaried, I was not able to keypunch data. Can you imagine?? An accountant could not comfortably work her own spreadsheets without worrying about some union complaint that would take all the oxygen out of the room and prevent any work from getting done.
This is why Maine always goes to the Demos. They love: Unions, Gubmint checks, and Workers Comp.
Good article. I’ll do my part to put an end to union manipulation of business and polititians – no more UAW products for me.
Old people are living too long and collectiong pensions for too long. We should kill them, grind them up into cookies to feed the hungry. What use as a resource are they anyway after their bodies wear out. Same with social security. Back in the day when people didn’t live as long it was the most efficient way to collect the most amount of money without paying out.
Redhart, did you not read the article? If the contributing businesses are as unproductive as the Union Auto Workers then yes they too need to make concessions. However this article is explaining why the American automotive industry is in trouble due to the unrealistic demands made by the unions. Why should they be bailed out when they are not willing to be realistic about what it will take for the industry to be competitive.
I agree that the biggest issue are the work rules, which are nothing but major time-wasters and create an irritable work environment.
It’s the worst aspect of this type of union. Personally, the union needs to be revamped, ideologically and otherwise, if it expects to do one bit of good.
And if now isn’t the time to expect that revitalization, no time would ever work.
Typical stupid blame-the-middle-class-worker rhetoric from a lot of ignorant people on this board.
My mother worked a union job for decades. She hated the union. Why? The woman that worked beside her was hired in 24 hours before Mom was. Therefore, regardless of quality of work, attendance, or attitude, the other woman was eligible for any promotions before my mother was. This woman, according to my mother, sat and read books all day long, while Mom, with her exemplary work ethics, made up the work for both of them. All this without merit raises or recognition. Shameful.
Steve P, You’re the ignorant one on this thread. You obviously can’t read a P & L, & haven’t ever done anything in your entire life but draw a paycheck from someone who I suspect is greatly overpaying you. What little knowledge you have comes from reading books rather than life experience, therefore you have no way of evaluating the objective reality of this article. STF when you don’t have a clue.
I would like a job where I am greatly overpaid. I want your job Steve P.
Check out “Rivethead” by Ben Hamper. He was a long-time line worker at GM Truck & Bus. Buried in all the horror stories about the tough work life was the fact that he and a line-mate almost always managed to “double up”, arranging their work so that one guy could cover both jobs. Eventually they got so good at it that the redundant guy might be in a bar 100 miles away during his shift. Hard to tell from his stories, though, if the underlying cause of the inefficiency was the workers, management, work rules, or what.
Productivity! You can only break the laws of economics for so long.
Soon the model will be:
‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’
Back in the USSR in the good ol’ USA!
We would never take a delivery time after 8AM because the dockworkers would have met their quota by then.
There are also distribution issues. The dealerships of American car manufacturers are subject to special state laws, either in all states or almost every state, which make it very difficult for the manufacturers to terminate or consolidate them.
Ther result is that the Big Three have several times as many dealers, per vehicle sold, as foreign car manufacturers. This increases the cost per Big Three vehicle on each sale relative to foreign manufacturers.
The ONLY ways to change this are bankruptcy or a new federal law which pre-empts the state laws. Good luck getting the latter in this century.
I don’t see how any of the Big Three, even Ford, can survive without bankruptcy getting rid of their uncompetitive UAW contracts, the UAW work restrictions, and the state dealership laws.
Even then Ford will likely be the only one of the Big Three to emerge from bankruptcy, and it might not.
Government bailouts will only delay this a few years at vast expense to American taxpayers.
I worked as a salaried engineer at the GM Proving Ground or Tech Center for 31 years.
As of Jan. 1, 2009, all my “promised” GM benefits are null and void. As in “zero”.
And, if GM declares bankrupcy, my pension goes away also.
The union has the power.
Knee down and salute them.
That is “all”.
Dan
I think a lot of unions suffer from this problem. They feel their job is to give job security to everyone who pays the dues. As a result I have seen union custodial workers playing cards, while people secretly clean up their own mess and fix their own problems, because it will take too long for the appropriate person to show up.
There is a need for a negotiator between workers and managers, but the unions do not fill the job, because the negotiator needs to keep both sides honest, and the unions fail miserably.
I spent a few months in the 80′s working around the United Steel Workers. Same ol S!
Union work rules are a major factor in the auto industry’s problems, but let’s not let management off the hook either. Look at the cars of 70′s and 80′s. Even if they were built well and efficiently, they would still have been junky designs poisoning the products reputation into the present.
I worked in a GM assembly plant for seven years as a contract engineer, and I can vouch for all of the stories here (short of the hooker in the RV…though we did have more than one off-shift case of UAW members bumpin’ uglies in unoccupied rooms). The work rules quite simply ruined any initiative aimed at making the facility more efficient, from scuttling large capital projects to making automated assembly processes more streamlined. There were a few cases where I was able to make a difference, but it was like moving heaven and earth to do so.
I had a lot of friends at GM, both UAW and salary, whom I respect for their abilities and dedication. But they are the exceptions, swimming upstream against a torrent of rigidly-enforced mediocrity.
Redheart, if those other companies are soliciting the government for free money, then yes, they should be subject to similar demands to restructure. Of course, that notwithstanding, their own economic interest dictates voluntary reform in coordination with the Little 3.
Government interference (CAFE, Wagner Act, state dealership laws) and unions’ unwillingness to face reality are the staple ingredients in this toxic brew. Unfortunately, with “card check” on the lips of Andy Stern and Ron Gettelfinger and Pelosi et al ascendant, true reform leading to fundamentally profitable companies seems doubtful.
In the late 70′s we had a client that was a unionized trucking company. Even the office workers were part of the union and if we needed a copy made we had to find the person whose job it was to make copies. If we were looking for a file we had to find whose job it was to pull those files.
When the trucking business was deregulated under Carter the company went out of business in less than a year. It was not hard to understand why.
No matter what some may say, most Americans want all of their fellow citizens to have good paying jobs that are not too demanding, and that they have reasonably good benefits. Few of us want people to suffer. Few of us want to demand others work for almost nothing in slave labor conditions. Those who want to dump on others, are the despicable among us.
However, when it comes to the Big Three, what we have is a conglomeration of ineptitude, incompetence, poor judgment, poor quality, and terrible demands which ignore productivity.
The UAW may or may not be good for workers. When one looks at the union work rules, one is reminded of the Internal Revenue Service tax code. Its pages & pages of babble designed to intimidate & frustrate average people. And, it works.
The Big Three were in trouble LONG before the current fiscal crisis. Their troubles emanated from many sources. Management, workers, design, and the union. Should out sourced suppliers suffer if the Big Three suffer? Its obvious they will if the Big Three fail. Its obvious there will be pain for almost anyone involved. Its obvious that each player is currently defending “their turf.” Each is pointing the finger at all others involved. In their minds, everyone & no one is responsible. In their minds, its the politicians & the fickle American public. Its never “their” responsibility. They are the “victims.”
Yeah, right!
Spending billions of taxpayers money to save an industry that had been in trouble long before this fiscal crisis,is like irrigating a desert with an ounce of water. All can see that the ounce of water will do almost nothing to solve the problem, and significantly more water will be required to ever produce a result, if even then. The money asked for today is a down payment for the extremely large sums of money the Big Three will be back to ask for later. Then they will say, “you’ve already invested this much & we think we are close to a solution, so you should spend even more now so we can determine if we can ever be capable of producing anything & survive in a competitive environment. Taxpayers simply cannot afford to bail out the Big Three since the bailout amounts required will always be more and will never end!
Its time the Big Three were allowed to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy & reorganize under the supervision of a Bankruptcy Court. That means all new contracts with suppliers, with management, and with the workers. That means existing excessively lucrative contracts become null & void. Its time the gravy train stopped. Its time reality set in. No one means workers should be screwed. But we also do not mean workers (or their union to be more accurate), should be able to dictate extreme terms of employment & work rules that even in the best of circumstances, were unrealistically & excessively liberal.
Right now, the UAW is in protective mode. They want to survive long enough to get Congress (specifically those members of Congress whose votes they bought through campaign contributions & other unknown favors), to pass “Card Check” legislation. With that in place, the union can coerce (oop’s, I mean convince), millions of other American workers to join unions. Then the lucrative union financial dues steam will be assured & the union will have more than enough funds to buy any public official & legislation they ever want. After all, once Card Check is passed, union organizers will be able to go around three in a group & strong-arm (oop’s, there I go again, I mean convince), to sign those little white cards ostensibly surrendering all of their rights to a group of thugs (I mean representatives), who will immediately set about looking after the best interests of the union ( I mean, workers), and solve all the problems of the world by crushing any management that might want to expect actual work from its employees.
The UAW might not be the only problem with the Big Three. However, it is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that has caused most of all of the problems & if it were removed or defanged, it would permit the Big Three & almost any other business to actually survive and get back to their actual business of being in business to produce something & make money for all parties involved.
Good article but not surprising, and you didn’t even mention the workers who get paid to just sweep the same few square yards of floor space over and over(as long as they don’t venture into the next guy’s few yards of floor space).
I only have one criticism from the first paragraph–the UAW does indeed bear some degree of responsibility for design and quality issues. Every dollar of their wage and benefit costs (and management’s) must be allocated to every vehicle sold. If those costs are excessive to begin with and further bloated by low productivity, in order to make the sale price close to competitive the designers must go through and remove anything they can get away with that will reduce the vehicle’s production cost. Less complexity and simpler manufacture becomes paramount. So that extra strut that would make the car handle smoother in curves (and get better reviews in the press) is gone. That higher-quality sound system and color map GPS become extra-cost items instead of standard. The seat coverings aren’t as nicely fitted as they could have been. The tires might need to be a little narrower, the engine a little smaller, the sheet metal a little thinner, plastic a little more prevalent, the paint formula a little less expensive. Pretty soon, you have an “unimaginative design” of lower quality.
I worked once for a big corporation where the management was afraid to confront the Union. I think really good management can drive unions out, but unions are necessary when management is inept and abusive.
If you cannot implement a Just-in-Time, Total Quality system these days, you’re DEAD.
American management is too LAZY to implement the Japanese systems that drive productivity and efficiency. They will pay for it: bankruptcy.
Paul Schlick is exactly right.
A specific example is the Ford Mustang, which has been available in models with a live axle and models with a superior independent rear suspension over the years. The IRS makes the car faster, safer, and better handling — but it adds cost, and because the Detroit Three are now health-care ponzi schemes that incidentally make cars, that cost has to come out.
The industry term for reviewing a car design to strip out cost is “sweating the product.”
I’m waiting to see the outcome of this bailout-begging — I need a new car and truck, and I have a long history of buying American. But if the USG decides my taxes should go to UAWelfare, then, they sure don’t need my car money. I can find a Toyota or Honda product that I can live with.
I only have one criticism from the first paragraph–the UAW does indeed bear some degree of responsibility for design and quality issues.
I didn’t say they don’t. I said that there is a (false) perception that they don’t.
Now Canada is telling America they will lose 525,000 jobs if the Big 3 go under. PM says Canada will go into a Great Depression.
We lose 300,000 workers and they lose 525,000? Go figure?
The Canadians have a socialists ‘right to work law’ that makes the Union look childish.
I served as a job steward- shop steward for 15 years.
Most grievances were stupid personality clashes. You know, the management hated the employee and his work ethics, the worker wanted to kill the managers.
I like to think that I saved hundreds of lives. ha
Many employees were good workers but were always being harassed by the IE people walking around with their stop watches telling us how many steps too many we were taking and the distance to the bathroom or the break room and how fast to get back..
Anyway…
As I look back on the two years of hell I spent in Vietnam were nothing compared to the 15 years I spent listening to crying old men and women in the managers office.
AND THAT WAS JUST THE MANAGERS!
I could usually handle the workers, I told them if they didn’t do their jobs and do quality work, I would see to it personally that they got fired.
Anyway…
Thanks for the rant-
I know the Canadians work sucked- because we had to do much of it over.
I know that my people gave good work because if they didn’t I personally made their lives a living hell.
Now the CEO knows how important my job was.
5 years after I left they shut the plant down.
My 2009 Mazda 6 was made by UAW workers in Flat Rock, Michigan. I’m not a union fan in the least, but it’s a great car. Obviously union workers can make great cars. So what is the difference? It seems logical to me that it’s in the engineering and management provided by Mazda. I used to enjoy blaming unions, but I just don’t think that will wash anymore in regard to the Detroit 3.
I understand also that much of the increased cost in American cars comes from legacy costs involving retiree health and retirement benefits. But given the amount of time that GM, for example, has been making cars, and the wealth it used to have at its disposal (remember how they bought Hughes Aircraft to add tech savvy for Saturn?, they could be putting Maybach and Bentley to shame at a reasonable price. If only GM (and Chrysler as well) had been managed well. Think what an economy we would have today.
“No matter what some may say, most Americans want all of their fellow citizens to have good paying jobs that are not too demanding, and that they have reasonably good benefits.”
Oh man. Does anybody know what a self-employed business owner goes through? No benefits, no pension, no sick leave, no holiday leave, no vacation time. 40 hours a week? Ha! Try as many hours as it takes to earn money. Dangerous working conditions? No one’s looking over their shoulder to stop ‘em. This and they get to pay all their own SS and Medicare and carry their own liability. (Don’t get started on what hiring empoyees entails). Until you’ve owned your own business you have no idea what “ideal working conditions” should be.
I was in a union job for years and had no idea what real working was til I met and married a business owner. Additionally I didn’t understand real freedom.
No, Rubicon, I don’t want everybody to have the perfect job. I want everyone to roll up the old sleeves and get to work… no matter what!
Now take everything you read there, multiply it by 1,000 and you have an insight as to how NYC operates. I was a contractor that worked with Local 3 electricians and the Transit Employees Union.
Their entire lives are dedicated to strangling the taxpayers for the most amount of money while sabotaging as much productity as humanly possible.
And I mean literally. If the electricians didn’t have enough work for their bloated union rolls, they’d go out into the subways and cut electrical lines to generate work for themselves. Or just go on “furlough” and take a 6 month vacation at 50% of pay and full benefits.
I could tell stories that would curl your hair.
Back in the sixties, I was a grad student in experimental physics. For some while, I was helping make an injector for a linear accelerator. That involved opening up vacuum systems, and stringing wire.
We had to block all the windows, and lock all the doors, because there were union men sniffing around all the time, trying to catch us doing Union Work. I ask you, what good is an experimental physicist who doesn’t know how to string wire and manage a vacuum system? And what the hell does a union electrician know about physics wiring?
That was why I decided that whatever the theory, unions were evil in practice. It’s been almost fifty years, and I haven’t seen anything to convince me otherwise.
My 2009 Mazda 6 was made by UAW workers in Flat Rock, Michigan.
Under what union rules? They’re unique to each company, and company contract. Mazda hasn’t been around long enough to be sufficiently encumbered to have become as uncompetitive as the Big Three…
“If they are contingent on the auto industry to stay afloat, will their workers make some sacrifices to keep their jobs? Will the businesses reduce the prices they charge the Big 3 in order to have a market for their materials?”
Depends. Do those companies make enough to be able to pay their employees? what is the profit margin for those companies? How efficient are they?
Steve P: where is anyone blaming the middle class worker? It what way are they ignorant? Back up your statement. Are you really claiming that everyone is wrong about the inefficiency?
Is the “jobs bank” still active? There is, and never was, and excuse for this travesty.
Steve P. doesn’t like the comments here; he should file a grievance wit’ da union.
“They were so well paid and unproductive, not because the market valued their labor at their wages and their product at its prices, but because they had a foot on the throat of the industry management…”
I don’t know, man. Management agreed to the work rules (and the wage structure), after good faith negotiations no less, so I’m not sure where you get the idea that “the market” didn’t value their labor.
Am I to believe that management deliberately overpaid their labor force because they were coerced by Big Labor’s throat-crushing boot?
Or is it more likely that the terms of the labor agreement is the most accurate picture of who values what and for how much?
On a side note…has anyone stopped to consider the philosophical ramifications of arguing that Americans are overpaid in comparison to their foreign counterparts?
That may be “free market” but it doesn’t bode well for American society. After all, from the top on down, very few people are paid better than American workers. They said we’d have to get better educations to compete globally. No one said anything about taking a pay cut, too…
Michael Barone’s column at US News & World Report today is very pertinent to this discussion. Here is link and some excerpts:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/barone/2008/12/15/who-is-at-fault-for-the-decline-of-the-big-three.html
“Who Is at Fault for the Decline of the Big Three?
Mickey Kaus, pretty much alone among the commentators I’ve been reading, indicts “Wagner Act unionism” for the decline and fall of the U.S. auto industry. The problem, he argues, is not just the high level of benefits that the United Auto Workers has secured for its members but the work rules—some 5,000 pages of them—it has imposed on the automakers. As Kaus points out, unionism as established by the Wagner Act is inherently adversarial. The union once certified as bargaining agent has a duty not only to negotiate wages and fringe benefits but also to negotiate work rules and to represent workers in constant disputes about work procedures.
… But of course it turned out that GM and Ford and Chrysler were in 1970 just on the verge of getting serious competition from foreign automakers. And in particular from Japanese automakers who managed their plants not according to Taylorism but by giving their workers more autonomy and more responsibility—by treating them like sentient human beings and not like dumb animals as Frederick Taylor taught. The Detroit Three by all accounts I have seen were slow to learn from this—and were even slower to apply the lessons the Japanese taught—because of Wagnerism. Japanese management required cooperation between managers and workers. Wagnerism insisted that all interaction between managers and workers be conducted on an adversarial basis. The 5,000 pages of work rules mean that GM can’t manage the way Toyota does.
… But can General Motors ever make money if it continues to be subjected to Wagnerism? Taylorism is pretty much dead in our society; no automaker free to make a choice chooses it as a way to manage its workforce. But its antidote, Wagnerism, remains. “Look at General Motors,” Mickey Kaus writes, “and tell me that strong unions are good for the economy.” But the Democratic Party is determined to shell out money to maintain Wagnerism in the U.S. auto companies and is committed to promoting Wagnerism by passing the card check bill, which will abolish secret-ballot unionization elections. They want to impose adversarial labor-management relations in large swathes of the private-sector economy that are, currently, in healthier condition than the Detroit Three. Does that sound like a good idea?”
True story: I worked at an aircraft plant during a machinists strike earlier this decade. During the strike, we white collars types cleaned the plant, threw out a bunch of old office equipment, and painted the walls, because during a strike was the only time this work could get done without violating Union rules.
The Flat Rock, Michigan plant that builds the Mazda6 is a joint venture of Mazda and Ford; the Mustang is also assembled there. (Ford owns a chunk of Mazda, though they no longer have controlling interest.)
Featherbedding and government bailouts / nationalization / unionization is how the British auto industry disappeared from the earth from the 1950′s to the 1990′s.
I can see Cadillac as an unscale brand of Tata Motors (India) and Buick as their competition — an upscale brand of Cherry Motors (Chinese).
Remember the Mazda Miata — M3 Mazda? This car is basically a copy of the British sportscars of the 1960′s but built and sold by people who tool the auto industry seriously.
OK Everyone -
Bottom Line is this – Having Been a UAW Committeeman in a former life – AND -the Husband/Prime Advisor to an NEA Local Pesident – “The Union” is there to provide the “maximum nickels” and due process to the membership in the case of a “beef” – beyond that, “the Union” had NO ROLE except to sponsor a Christmas Party. That is all.
Dr. Shalit
Ford’s Camacari plant in Brazil appears to be state of the art. Why can it not build factories like this in the US?
I think many Americans would be suprised to see what Ford is capable of doing but can’t/won’t do in the US.
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
So this year I worked a union carpenter job. People asked me how much I got paid. I said $300 an hour.
I explained it was really only $50 an hour for eight hours, but I only really did an hour and a half of work. So I got $400 for an hour and half, or $300/hr.
It gets worse. Often I was paid to do what should of not been done.
You don’t even what to look for numbers on piece work. due to rules, bad communications, don’t-kill-the-job-attitude, labor hours per task, at $50/hr where triple or more. Easy.
After a while I just shut down, and went with the flow.
One question I have is, when the Big 3 go out of business, whether any employer in his/her right mind will hire any former members of the by-then defunct UAW.
“Why should I give them a chance to kill my company the way they killed their car company?”
This may be why the UAW won’t give up a thing. Many of their members might not ever get another job.
Reality is not in sight in this argument.
In order to survive, the B3 need just one thing, and they cannot survive if they fail to get it.
It’s not wage concessions, or work rules.
It’s relief from all of the union retirees sitting out there, living nicely on the checks that, in hindsight, are far, far too big for the B3 to sustain.
But the B3 entered into lifelong contracts with those workers for those benefits, and they cannot simply wait for the expiration date and then refigure the payouts. Those retirees, sympathetic figures or not, joined in those contracts in good faith, and don’t deserve to be dumped into poverty – the B3 should completely fail before that happens.
Watch. Everything is being angled and massaged so that, as a final quiet move, those pension liabilities are going to somehow become the taxpayers’ responsibility.
And the UAW will have then learned another hard and valuable lesson: everything comes to him who waits.
V the K, your story reminds me of Congress. We are only safe when Congress is either not in session or is in a state of gridlock. Same with unions: we are only productive when unions are on strike.
This household will never, ever again buy a UAW product and we are boycotting as many union businesses as possible. Unions and Wagnerism (and Democrats, but I repeat myself) are destroying this country.
Redheart, the D3 have drained their suppliers out of every bit of profit they could. If a supplier found a way to save 2 cents on a part, the D3 would want them to lower the price by 2 cents or even more!
I ran a warehouse for a abrasive product company in Warren, MI for 22 years. Most of our customers did work for the D3 or their main suppliers. These small companies wouldn’t get paid for 120 days for their work. And if they dropped the job due to slow payment, they would have to wait even longer. The D3 basically used these guys for interest-free loans. So after squeezing these small guys for years (and putting some out of business) I have no sympathy for the D3 now.
Those retirees, sympathetic figures or not, joined in those contracts in good faith, and don’t deserve to be dumped into poverty
All those white-collar workers contributing to their 401(k)s in good-faith didn’t “deserve” to be “dumped into poverty” either, but in the real world, excrement happens.
And I don’t have any sympathy for people who rely on someone else to take care of them instead of planning for their own futures. Imprudent at best, lazy at worst.
That Mazda 6 was built in what is essentially a Ford plant. It’s a joint venture between Ford and Mazda (Ford still owns about 15% of Mazda and the two companies share platforms) and is pretty much operated by Ford. The same plant builds Mustangs.
Ford makes decent cars in Europe and GM makes damn good cars in Oz (ie Holden). So why are they making such rubbish in the US?
Also does it not annoy you when people going on about “buying American” when it comes to cars (and they mean the big 3) no matter how bad they are?
I usually reply…well our ML was built in the US. That does not seem to count for some reasons.
I was a supervisor at Ford for 32 years and I can tell you that the article above is “spot on”. Many times, rather then wait for a fork truck driver or skilled trade to get off their butt, I’d do the required job and tell them to have the committee man bring a voucher and I’d pay it for the time I worked. After a while, it turned into such a brew-ha that I was forced to quit doing that. Hour long breaks and 2 hour lunches for some of those idiots drove me half crazy. They did it to themselves….now they reap what they’ve sown. LOL!!!
I’ve never held a union job. I’ve been turned down for dozens of them, mainly because I was a retired senior NCO with a history in the intelligence business. In that business, you learn to do everything for yourself, or plan to be unproductive for two or three days. It’s a long, tough hassle to “sanitize” a vault or work area so someone can come in and install a telephone. You learn to do it yourself. If the plumbing leaks, you fix it. If your computer develops problems, you fix it.
As for unions, look what forced unionization has done for passenger service in the United States. All the nation’s railroads for forcibly unionized by executive order under Franklin Roosevelt. They’re still sitting there.
who says those lazy ass workers need unions. work rules, bah. personally, i like the old indentured servitude. poor laws. debtor’s prison. i think we did ourselves a disservice by getting rid of one and not starting the others. hey, there’s still time.
Judy, NYC….In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last 50 years, just wanted to enlighten you that there are so many government regulations regarding employees and the workplace that the unions total function at this time in history is to collect dues from ignorant workers who do not know their own rights OR are forced into paying them by their own states laws. Why you are in favor of collecting dues from workers that go to pay off politicians is beyond me.
Thank you, Lori, for a story that should have great impact and thank you for having the courage to write it.
Jerry, Tennessee
If anyone gets this far, this is my opinion. The article is questionable. The reason why the auto industry is in turmoil is because of the NAFTA agreement signed by Bill Clinton. It took 12 years to destroy the U.S. economy. Unfair tariffs on exports and not enough U.S. enforcement on the imports, are major problems. Keep shipping the crap in, some dope will buy it. U.S. companies, mine included, outsourcing to other countries saving companies billions and taking $ out of YOUR pocket, (the average American worker). The U.S. Government not enforcing current rules and regulations on companies breaking laws, SEC not to mention names. I would not blame the Unions for the Auto industries problems. After all, THEY, helped YOU make your current wage. I have seen, what I feel are abuses by the Union representatives, basically taking advantage of their positions. I do not believe in getting 95% of your pay when you are off either. The Union workers need to realize that most of the benefits that they are being asked to give up, or could be giving up, have already been getting taken from my paycheck for the last 10 years. THE FUTURE CONCESSIONS THAT THE UNIONS WILL NEED TO MAKE ARE GOING TO MAKE THEM SCREAM BLOODY MURDER. FYI, I am not a union worker, BUT, I do work along the lines of the auto industry in the D.
Tell me, whatever happened to opening a company, take on workers, make $250,000-$375,000 a year salary, grow your company, share the profits with the hard workers that made your company grow so they could help the economy evolve?
Why are ANY CEO’s making MILLIONS a year, salary, bonus, etc? What about those abuses that damaged the economy?
I find the unions digusting. They are overpaid and underworked and have few if any ethics. The union management is no better then the Jimmie Hoffa’s gangsters of the past. When the Dems give them “card Check” the abuses will be terrible. I say let the companies go bankrupt. It is just a matter of time that the auto companies will follow the Textiles, Steel and Electronic companies overseas because of the unions. Everytime a company goes unions, that seems to be the kiss of death. I used to pride myself on buying American but it is hard to find anything that is made in America. For the first time in my 64 years, I sure will not be buying any vehicle from Detroit. I’m tired of paying for the unions fatcat wages and benefits when other hard working men and women I know are making half of what those crooks make.
Don – ” … I sure will not be buying any vehicle from Detroit.”
I read several places where people figured they’d reward Ford by going with their products if Ford refused bailout money and the others didn’t. So far, however, since the actual bailout was announced I have yet to see anyone displaying that attitude. Ford probably avoids some mess by not taking the funds, but it doesn’t look like it bought any support from those who were screaming about Detroit and the bailout. Ford seems to be lumped in with the others no matter what.
I’m just thinking aloud about the difference between pre-bailout comments here and there, and post bailout comments here and there.
Regards
Let us cut to the chase …raking in high dollars for eight hour shifts with only six hours of low quality work (and joking about it) is the problem and it is killing this nation. If union greed and gimme mine keeps up we will all be in soup lines and the first ones to belly ache long and loud will be the pigs from the union troughs! I only wish the Repubs could break these union hogs. Fact is the Demoratz are owned lock stock and barrel by the union greed mongers and they are riding shotgun for them. I see lots of pain coming.
Swamp — The whole, entire point of NAFTA is to abolish tariffs. It’s free trade. Get it? Free trade?
There are no (or minimal tariffs) among the countries in NAFTA.
The fact that you don’t understand this is comical.
“One question I have is, when the Big 3 go out of business, whether any employer in his/her right mind will hire any former members of the by-then defunct UAW.”
Remember that the UAW isn’t just autoworkers any more. They’ve branched out.
I work for my state’s motor vehicle department in a non-union position. The clerks in the branch offices are all UAW.
I hear stories like one from a branch manager in which a clerk was incredibly rude to customers but there just wasn’t much the manager could do about it due to union and civil service rules. The manager I heard that from gave up after a while and went back to his old position (a lateral move for the most part) in the department so he wouldn’t be around those clerks.
In fairness, I know the majority of the clerks aren’t like that, but the rules make it hard to weed out the bad ones or encourage people to be the good ones.
Reminds me of the time that my tiny company went to exhibit our wares at a trade show, and as we were preparing our booth, the union steward came around to stop us from doing one particular task that he said required union labor. That task: sticking legal-paper-sized signs with velcro on them to the carpeted sides of our booth. Sign erection was a specialty.
When we packed up a few days later, we were forbidden from using our own dolly (hand-truck) to take our own stuff to our van, which was about about 200 yards away from the exhibit space. The steward granted that we could carry them by hand, though, so we spent far more time, labor, and sweat doing it that way. We were furious but felt a bit vindicated that we didn’t pay the union to do these simple tasks.
The Unions have now outlasted their usefulness; if anyone can remember what they stood for 100 years ago. The UAW and its members could not stand up to the pay for performance expectations that the rest of the working country lives up to – every day. It’s time for all of these unions to go!
I think Maggie (#7) is right on. I too would gladly vote my displeasure with unions by refusing to buy union made products – if I only knew which ones they were. How about requiring labeling aimed at helping consumers understand what they’re buying? Where did the parts come from? Where was the labor done? Were the parts and labor unionized? To what extent?
I couldn’t care less if my fruit is organic or how much trans fat is in my cookie – tell me what goes into the products I buy from a labor and country of origin perspective instead. Then those that want to support unions are welcome to and those that don’t can avoid that support. Let’s equip people with the information needed to make informed decisions and then let the chips fall where they may.
These union workers are precisely the descendants of the Luddites of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their object is to fight against efficiency as a means of protecting jobs. The Luddites were proven wrong by the market. Industrialization resulted in cheap products that anyone could afford. Work weeks dropped from 72+ hours to less than forty. Living standards improved for every income stratum. The benefits of technology and streamlining should be continuing this trend, improving everyone’s life, but the unions are preventing delivery of these benefits to society at large and they should be banned.
Forty plus years ago I began working as a secretary for the plant manager at a new plant manufacturing kraft grocery bags in Buena Park, Ca. One of my duties was doing the payroll for the hourly workers.
When the building was finished and the machines were up and running, we had about 15 hourly workers, from a man who was a genius with any machinery, to a young man who had IQ issues, but who really wanted a job and worked as hard as he could. The rest pretty much followed a standard bell curve. The management knew that the union would be coming, but in the meantime, each person was paid according to his production, in quality as well as quantity.
When the union came in, that all changed. Each man was to be paid the same, regardless of his ability and effectiveness. Management wound up paying the really good machinist under the table in order to keep him. The young man who could not keep up with the others had to be let go.
This was my first encounter with the unions, and I have not changed my mind over the years. The unions promote mediocrity and nothing else.
When I was a teenager in the early 1950s, I was a member of the Teamsters for a summer job. I attended a strike vote and learned a lot about unions. The young guys with no families were all for a strike to “teach the company a lesson.” The older workers with kids in college voted no but were outnumbered. I have been anti-union since then although it took a college economics class to make me a Republican.
Later, I was an engineer working in the old Douglas Aircraft plant in El Segundo. The engineers were almost as lazy as UAW workers. One guy came to work every day for a year without doing anything at all. Nobody seemed to care. When I was working there in 1959, every engineer I knew was getting out of engineering, going to law school or medical school or getting an MBA. I went to medical school then spent 30 years running a small business called a medical practice. Kids in medical school now all plan to work for someone else and are almost all Democrats.
The issue with the bailout and the intent to build “green” cars is what happens when all those electric cars are on the lot and the unbailed car makers are turning out car that people really want to buy? Is the government going to say you have to buy them? I think the US could turn into a sort of Cuba, with people driving 50 year Suburbans and F-150′s.
The president elect made it perfectly clear that he would “fight” for unions.
Perhaps the word “fight” is not the proper word.
Care to replace it with something more definitive, anyone?
Having read all seventy comments (so far), it’s impressive to see how many contain horror stories of union abuse with just a smattering of hysterical return-to-slave-labor comments.
I saw the longshoremen’s union in Chicago put themselves out of a job when they couldn’t include Indiana dockworkers in the Chicago union. The Indiana workers–this in the early seventies at the new Burns Harbor facilities–were largely returning Viet vets who were willing to work and have a union that let them. I wonder now, thirty years later and having put the Chicago sluggards on the dole, if the current Indiana longshoremen have turned into what they beat to get their jobs in the first place.
The big three would be profitable if they weren’t in the health care and retirement business as much as they are in the car business. It was GM that began the practice of corporations offering workers a company paid benefit package—not in answer to a demand by unions, but in response to unions looking at providing those services themselves. GM took the initiative to offer benefits as a way to block the unions from being in control of the money and power that providing health and retirement benefits would give them.
and yes, there are plenty of legitimate stories of union featherbedding. There are equal numbers of stories of nepotism, incompetence, committee decision making and managers who made a career out of covering their ass rather than making decisions that describe the reality of GM management. As Tom Friedman recently noted—they have lost 74 billion in the past five years but no executive heads have rolled because of it. yet, somehow it is all the unions fault….i think not
I know this article is about the Big 3 – excellent article tw. The one comment that I did not see in the 70+ that I read, was the big picture in all this. It is great for people to make as much money as they can, but the reason that the free-trade agreements and places like Wal-Mart are so popular is that most people can’t afford to buy anything that is union made. And, let’s not kid ourselves, the auto industry is not the only one that deals with unions. Unfortunately, the federal, state, and city governments (along with a whole host of companies) have unionized workers. I have worked for municipalities for most of my career, and it is not unusual to have people work at the slowest pace they can get away with. I am not saying that everyone is like that, as I have butted heads with people for years, but the one comment earlier about not wanting employees overworked, hits the nail on the head for a lot of companies dealing with unions.
The bigger problem though, is politicians who always promise to “change Washington,” and before you know it, they start receiving campaign donations and get swallowed up by the system. IMHO, politicians do little more than campaign the whole time they’re in office, as Obama did when he was elected to the state legislature, and then to Congress. The Presidential campaign lasted two years, so for that time, Obama, Hillary, McCain, and Biden were thinking about something other than doing their jobs – jobs that pay very well. My solution would be that any candidate who decides to run for office should resign their current office first. That way, they’re not getting paid to run for office. For those who are running for re-election, they should do it on their own time, like the rest of us have to do when job hunting.
As far as contributions, they should go to a central clearinghouse and divided evenly among people running for office, that way no one can “buy” influence.
I know none of this will happen, but it’s good to dream. Sorry for the long rant.
I worked a summer job in a union shop for several years. I got talked to by the union rep in my first week because some workers thought I was not taking my breaks. I took my half hour for lunch as scheduled, but the norm was to take two hour lunches. We made beer cans and my job was to package large skids of cans for shipping. Often the can would come to be packaged without paint/ink because the inker was asleep or at the bar. By the time the cans got to me and I stopped the line 20, 000 cans would have to be scrapped.
My brother in-law was a shop steward for several years before he got tired of defending people to flipping tow motors because they were drunk or high on the job.
Unions only protect the lazy and useless employees. The hard workers don’t need the unions.
I am a small business owner and if the union ever came in then I would close up the business.
What is really killing the Big 3 are the legacy costs of healthcare and pensions for their retirees. What no one mentions is that the Big 3 is just a microcosm of the United States as a whole with our unfunded Medicare and Social Security. These programs are in the hole to 53 TRILLION.
I don’t plan on collecting when I am due.
some 30 or more years ago an american industrial engineer went to JAPAN to train their auto workers in modern industrial techniques.A few years after that an evaluation was made comparing productivity between the Japanese and American auto workers.the results were staggering.The j`s were paid 1/2 the cash wages,produced twice the output.The advantage was 4 to one.The invasion of J auto companies started forthwith.
Herb, the market did/does not value autoworker labor at its current prices, and, yes, management deliberately overpaid their labor force. But it wasn’t due merely to strong-arm tactics by the UAW. The Big 3 had a frickin’ monopoly–or, more accurately, an oligopoly. In the 1950s, they controlled 90% of the market; they had no real competition. They could control output and prices. This type of situation benefits the producers (i.e., producer surplus)–and management and labor often squabble about divvying up the rewards. That’s where the outlandish labor contracts came in. The industry could pass the cost of it on to the consumer. But then came globalization, which facilitates international trade and, also, competition. The Big 3 market share dropped. (It’s currently at about 45%.) Because of competition, U.S. automakers could not continue to pass price increases onto consumers (since it would cause revenues to fall); instead they had to focus on cost cutting. Ergo standardization, commoditization, and outsourcing (to take advantage of comparative advantage–mostly in terms of cheapness of labor). In other words, the auto companies used market power to benefit themselves and their labor force for years, but competition revealed their unsustainable wage and benefits packages. The market is finally being allowed to weigh in on the situation, and its not pretty. The Big 3 needs to cut anchor or die.
After reading all the above comments and learning that GM is receiving their first check today, which they have stated there will be no cost saving negoiations with the union, creditors and others; I’m going out and buying a KIA.
Adios BIG 3!
Great that you had an auto workering experience, but you left out who let you go or did you just leave the job because you felt so superior watching human beings work at labourous jobs while you stood judgement over them. But I don’t see the credentials that make you an expert on the subject of comparrison with UAW workers to all other workers in the American workplace. The GM cars have won awards for the best made vehicles in the world. The Power’s award? How do you think that happened if there is no quality and excellant productivity at thier plants? The truth is that there is so much jealousy out there against the UAW because in the Auto plants there are thousands of disillusioned people working the lines with degrees in everything from soup to nuts, who can’t find a job in the American workplace. You have to have a scapegoat, someone to blame the current American job market failures on, so why not the Union workers. It could not be that you let your politicians take money under the table to look the other way as they sent all the white collar jobs to places like India,and build plants here that hire illegals and send the money offshore instead of investing it in America, so that your degree is worthless over in this country. Don’t need an engineer here darlin cause the job is overseas, and Big Money has replaced even the most skilled American Job Seeker with a foreign counterpart. Then who let all the Kia’s and Toyota’s and Honda’s Corporations rape our country with “No Taxes Paid” specials on thier products. Are we so living in denial that we can’t see the Trade Deficit in this country? The saddest thing of all is the time passing while so many wage a fight against the middle class who hangs on, using the UAW as the brand name, the people who ran off with everyones money on Wall Street and in Washington are laughing thier hind ends off, as months are passing and evidence is destroyed as we open our 401K statements and scratch our heads. The UAW did not take your money, the so called corporate legals ripped us off and continue to by having our money go to thier banks and charge us 28% interest to charge our gasoline and utility bills, and the like. I know this is complicated for some like the above author, but for the sake of survival,I would rather spend my time trying to correct wrongs of the current system that allowed the rape and pillage of our counties wealth & Jobs, than begrudge a UAW worker for having an extra bathroom break. Of course the biggest thing we can’t correct is why some people are so Anti American that they would buy a Kia or a BMW if it put thier Mother out of a job, just because they are making a statement of freedom to be an idiot. As the bumper sticker says. “Buying foreign today? Have you lost your job yet”?
I’ll spare everybody the 5 paragraph dissertation. The UAW is a Dinosaur. Their time has passed and the only way the American auto industry will ever survive is if they are ejected. All thier horrible attitudes and all their Union bosses who are former workers have to go. It’s really that simple. You’ll see lines a mile long with people lined up to do the same jobs for half the pay and benefits, and none of the attitudes. Chapter 11 is inevitable. I say extract the Cancer now and save the working taxpayers Billions of $$$. If that hurts the foreign suppliers who make parts for the cars, TOO BAD. And for all the UAW people? Have fun at Walmart making $8 an hour and getting a coffee mug made in China for your Xmas bonus. You will soon find out what your actual skill level pays in the real world. Hope you saved some of that $$$$….
Obama has stated he is a UNION SUPPORTER. Enough said, Not really, but would it make any difference what I think?
Union rules! Ha !
I’ll bet very few people have any insight into the STAGE HAND’S union.
Don’t get me started. Anyway, nobody would believe me.
You know, I work for Intel, where I am certainly not a union employee and where my work is at a far higher skill level and where I am surrounded by far more intelligent and educated individuals…and I can still cite plenty of instances that are similar to the ones listed by the author of this piece, and I can cite just as many obstructions to productivity by useless bureaucracy, redundancy in labor and needless division of labor that easily cost my company hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) a year. I think the things you will find that Intel and the Detroit Three have in common is that they are all work big companies with an upper management that is very disconnected from its labor and its process.
Plant work rules clearly affect productivity in the auto industry. However, it’s not fair to put the blame for them entirely on the UAW because many of the most troublesome rules originated long before the industry was unionized out of the now largely discredited theories of Frederick Taylor–the proliferation of narrow job classifications composed repetitive assignments quickly learned by uneducated employees. These and other concepts did not originate with the UAW, but were incorporated in union agreements when the plants were unionized, BY AGREEMENT with management. These wage agreements and many other work rules have accumulated over 60 years and are very hard to change. Since the 1980s the company and union have recognized the need for change and cooperated to change the plant rules and culture. That was why Saturn was formed in the early 1980s. NUMMI also was used as a model for change in GM plants. Plant managers and union leaders spent time together at NUMMI to see for themselves how the Toyota production system worked, and how the number of grievances were kept down close to zero through better communications and mutual respect between UAW representatives and NUMMI managers.
The transplants were able to start with a clean slate in new plants and with policies which reflected new behavioral science concepts and policies advocated by W. Edwards Deming, e.g., very few job classifications (two production classifications: Team Member and Team Leader, and two skilled trades classifications: mechanical maintenance and electrical maintenance whereas, a typical big three plant had multiple production and skilled trades job classifications which resulted in many disputes, problems and inefficiencies.) The UAW and the auto companies have cooperated to eliminate many of these problems through “modern operating agreements” which permit more efficient production and maintenance. A number of Big Three plants equal or exceed productivity in the Japanese transplants.
From my experience in GM, the UAW deserves criticism for letting the local negotiations process get out of control when Leonard Woodcock was President and Irving Bluestone VP of the GM department. Local unions, instead of making good faith efforts to settle grievances on their merits saved them up to be bargained wholesale under the gun of a local strike deadline. This put tremendous pressure on management to concede to extreme demands at key parts plants or assembly plants for models in short supply. This process spread from triennial contract negotiations to strike authorizations during the contract over allegedly unreasonable production standards or health and safety hazards. The UAW damaged plant efficiency in many GM plants by sujecting them to the pressure of 5-day strike authorization notices. And GM management failed to develop an effective policy to deal with this problem. Instead of insisting that grievances be dealt with in the regular grienvance and arbitration procedure on their merits, out of short-run sales and profits considerations, management succumbed to countless unreasonable grievance settlements and unwise agreements on local work rules. Unravelling the accumulated mess cannot be accomplished by the stroke of a pen by the national parties. A long and arduous process is required.
At the national negotiations level mistakes were made as well. In my estimation the worst was the infamous “Jobs Bank” agreement negotiated by Alfred S. Warren, with the approval of Roger Smith, with Owen Bieber. Instead of telling the UAW that it was impossible to guarantee lifetime income security in a collective bargaining agreement; that job security could be achieved only by making attractive products and selling them at affordable prices; and this was especially true in view of the unprecedented international competition facing the company. GM didn’t tell the union that. Instead the company, at a time the need to downsize was forseeable, made an agreement that greatly increased the cost of downsizing. This 1982 agreement should have gotten a Darwin award for the worst agreement in the history of collective bargaining.
I think we are now living in an interesting times. Nice to hear that the congress are making ways to improve fuel-economy standards most especially to car enthusiasts. Btw, how about the oil demands?
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Theater Rat @ #82: I’ve been an independent lighting director for thirty-three years on rock tours. I’ve seen it all, coast-to-coast. I would believe you because I’ve lived it.
IATSE is despicable.
I remember working in the 1980′s as an engineer in a union shop in Louisville KY. I was forbidden from even touching a tool by shop rules.
We had a defective pump/motor that needed to come out.
I called for an electrician. But it was 20 minutes until the start of break, so the electricians were putting away their tools and “washing up” so they would be clean in preparation for their break.
I waited, the line down.
The break ended, and about 10 minutes later, the electrician appeared (without tools) then went back to the shop to get his tools and returned in another 15 minutes.
The electrician opened the cover and unwired the motor. He then stopped and started to leave. I asked why he was leaving without finishing the job. He told me he could not remove the bearing lube oil cup and needed an oiler (different job classification) for that. Also he would need a pipe fitter to remove the pump pipe connections and a machinist to unbolt the motor from the base.
About 45 minutes later, he returned with the small army of unionists. Each did his specific job and the pump was finally out. After his task was done, each tradesman remained in the area, watching the others work without reporting back to the shop for the next job.
Then just as we were ready to go get the replacement (for some reason, the brothers felt the old pump needed to be completely removed before actually getting a new one from the parts dept, it was 20 minutes PRIOR to lunch and the unionists left to return their tools and wash up for lunch. And about another hour later, the 4 workers returned. Without tools and without the new pump – guess they needed to see if the job had changed before selecting which tools to bring. So then they got the pump and their tools. Another 30 minutes.
Another hour and the pump was running again. Close to half a shift and 4 union trade brothers for a one-man, 30 minute job. I was surprised we didn’t need a carpenter to uncrate the new pump. The steward probably forgot that.
With such amazing productivity, there was small wonder that these brothers were picking up 20+ hours a week in time-and-1/2 and double-time overtime. The common measure of their yearly take was that they should not be paying social security by June.
The plant was later closed and the work transferred to a non-union supplier in North Carolina.
Who could have guessed?