I don’t know about you, but having all the cheap plastic parts break or squeak because the company had to cut material costs to make up for slacker union wage costs is not appealing to me.

The union doesn’t decide to make a cheap car, or a large car – that’s the management. Union wages are not the cause of cheap plastic parts, despite your strained logic. Wages at UAW plants are not that different from any other north american car plants. The problem goes back decades to a period when GM absolutely dominated the motor vehicle industry worldwide, but failed to plan for the eventual competition that savaged their market share.

Rather than scramble to catch up on the engineering side, Detroit played accounting games and fought emissions laws, while banking on the long term success of plainly unsustainable vehicle sales. If the management teams at GM and Chrysler had been worth their salaries, both companies would be in much better shape. There is no way that any reasonable person can assign blame to the line workers for the massive failure of leadership.

If US car companies had built a reliable car that matched Japanese vehicle quality thirty years ago, there would be no need to mistakenly blame the unions for the bailout. Corporate greed and short-sightedness is the ultimate cause.

Peace.

DS

But this: “GM and Chrysler did not do a good job of building vehicles that appeal to Americans. This cannot be laid at the feet of the UAW or Obama.”

is rich. Really? How about quality scores? I don’t know about you, but having all the cheap plastic parts break or squeak because the company had to cut material costs to make up for slacker union wage costs is not appealing to me. If American cars are getting good scores for quality and reliability these days, that’s news, because they’ve been awful for decades. The Koreans beat them to the 10-year warranty. Why? Because the Koreans were confident they could do it, and the Americans were confident they had better start pretending.

You don’t think any of that had to do with the culture of entitlement that is part and parcel to the purpose of a union?

Nobody said The Obama built awful GM cars. Nobody even suggested he knew which end of a wrench was the business end. But then, if he doesn’t know a damned thing about building cars, why is he arrogating to himself the right to decide the fate and operations of car companies?

Don’t feed us this “all that’s bad is Bush’s fault, and all that’s good is Obama’s” nonsense. (Yes, that’s what it is.)

Bush didn’t build lousy cars at Chrysler either, and even if he’s “to blame” (he isn’t, but let’s just go with it) that tells us absolutely nothing about Obama’s decisions. Christ, it’s like we’re talking foreign policy here, where nobody does anything in the world according to their own lights, but merely as a reaction to the evils of America and/or Bush. Obama’s a grownup. He’s the Word Made Flesh. He’s fully capable of realizing that if you find yourself in a hole you don’t grab the biggest shovel made by man and pretend that coming out on the side of China is a solution.

But more to the point is the foolishness by which JHM and others like him equate unions with workers. Or unions with the poor. The fact is that unions exist to protect the jobs of those in the union. NOT to expand jobs to people who have not been so blessed. It’s a cartel. One effect of a cartel is to drive down prices for those unwilling or unable to play.

Black South Africans were notoriously locked out of jobs by white unionists. In the U.S. unions variously controlled by Irish, Italians, Poles and others effectively locked out other ethnicities.

Given any population of workers and a “natural” turnover and hiring rate, you can see pretty easily that the presence of a union will likely drive down wages throughout the rest of the market. If Company A, under non-union conditions, hires on 200 employees per year out of a given population, but under union conditions is only able to hire on 100 employees per year (due to the added labor costs that are the purpose of a union), what happens to the net 100 workers? They compete in the rest of the market for jobs. You now have a surplus of 100 workers. What happens to compensation? The union guys do well. Which is why they’ll sometimes act with thuggish violence to protect their loot. But everyone else – including the poor “scab” who just wants to work – will do worse.

So the question is, given JHM’s love of unions, why he hates minorities and poor, non-union workers so much.

Turnabout…

P.S. It’s been shown over and over that born wealthy tend to be liberal. Self-made wealthy tend to be economically conservative/libertarian. They have an adult’s appreciation for the mechanism that got them there.

http://greensrealworld.blogspot.com/2009/06/finally-europe-getting-it-right.html

The UAW idled Chrysler’s jobs bank earlier this week, and as of February 2, the UAW and General Motors will shut down the job bank it also maintains for its workers. GM is paying the 1,600 workers currently in the system 85% of their on-the-job wages. As of February 3, they will receive a measure of supplemental pay from GM and can apply for unemployment, the total of which should come to 72% of their former pay. The move potentially leaves Ford’s jobs bank as the only one left running, but Ford has yet to comment on its status.

The UAW idled Chrysler’s jobs bank earlier this week, and as of February 2, the UAW and General Motors will shut down the job bank it also maintains for its workers. GM is paying the 1,600 workers currently in the system 85% of their on-the-job wages. As of February 3, they will receive a measure of supplemental pay from GM and can apply for unemployment, the total of which should come to 72% of their former pay. The move potentially leaves Ford’s jobs bank as the only one left running, but Ford has yet to comment on its status.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/01/28/uaw-agrees-to-suspend-gm-job-banks-on-feb-2/

As to whose fault it is that American auto companies are falling apart: can’t anyone accept that it’s *everyone’s* fault. It seems if you think that the corporate idiots who ran General Motors are responsible, you must then think the Union blameless, and vice versa. In actual point of fact, neither group did anything to support the company, and when the economy went south so did its sales. If the corporate guys are so incompetent, then why is it that all the successful companies in America are in right-to-work states? If you answer that this is because they’re run by more competent executives, then the question becomes: Why did those more competent executives go to such lengths to avoid the unions? I think that question answers itself. Why would you pay more for less work? You’d have to be an idiot (or a GM executive) to think that a good idea.

One sidenote: when our brilliant government minds decided the public should own GM, and the executive branch’s people began huddling with GM’s top executives every evening, one of the first subjects of discussion was no doubt which plants to close. I bet the one at the top of the government’s list is the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. TN is a right to work state, and the existence of the plant has long stuck in the UAW’s craw.

I find it ironic President Obama, community organizer, wants to control every USA private company, yet he himself has never run his own private business. The man is a megalomaniac given his narcissism.

GM & Chrysler will continue to bleed red instead of going into the black thanks to the Federal Government’s intervention via the corrupt Democrats, President Obama, & the UAW.