knoxnews.com | Because I said so
Bailout may not be the right answer for our auto industry. But fair discussion of the issue is impossible when the real motivation for some legislators is not what’s best for the American economy, but their not-so-secret desire to kill off the American labor movement. Union leaders should be open to further concessions if needed, but making union contracts the focus of this important, many faceted debate is myopic and unw
Hilarious hysteria. The US auto industry wouldn’t need a bailout in the first place but for the out-of-control demands of predatory unions over the past several decades.
I grew up in Muncie, Indiana, once a thriving center of auto and other industrial manufacturing. Now it is pure rust belt, limping along with the number one employer in Delaware County being Ball State University. And you can thank the unions for that. (via Instapundit).
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
I’m not one to jump to the defense of the UAW, or the AFL-CIO in general, but union greed, intransigence, thuggery, and political manipulation is only part of the story.
We can’t tell the whole story of the decline of the Big 3 without also covering the “Too Big To Fail” arrogance and incompetence of their management, or the collusion with local, state, and Federal government. There’s the CAFE trap, which made it so that only truck and SUV sales made money, followed by this year’s oil shock, that permanently damaged the market for high-ticket gas guzzlers. There’s the American-content rules, which required foreign makers to make some of their cars here, but which also led the Big 3 to export every job they were allowed to export over to Mexico. There’s the shoddy workmanship. The ethanol boondoggle. The crappy designs of overpriced cars that nobody wants.
There’s the greed and shortsightedness of both union and management to do everything they could to delay the reckoning, pushing as much as they could into pension plans and health benefits, which wouldn’t have to be paid up front, but could be delayed. The Big 3 have never contributed sufficiently to their pension funds to keep them solvent. In fact, I would suggest that the MBS/CDO meltdown was in large part driven by chronically underfunded pension plans desperate to find an investment that was both “safe” so they’d be allowed to buy it, but with rates of return high enough to keep up with their ballooning obligations. (Of course this is not limited to the automakers, but they’re notoriously bad pension-fund managers.)
Finally, there’s the vicious threat from all of them, management, union, and government, that you can’t make them go bankrupt, you can’t make them readjust capacity, salaries, wages, and benefits to fit their real market share, because they’d rather liquidate than restructure. They’re trying to hold the whole country hostage, claiming incessantly that “3 million jobs will be lost” or some such scare story. This is not the behavior of honorable people, it’s the behavior of terrified amoral idiots, facing the end of the line, choosing to take themselves hostage rather than face the truth.
Ford couldn’t even generate a winning Lions squad when they had one of the best RBs in history, Barry Sanders. If that doesn’t show you what kind of subgenius we’re talking about, nothing will.
Which is one reason a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing a right to work is desirable. And why advocating the card check system should be a capitol offense. It’s why under no circumstance should any State or Federal agency aid any of these maroons.
Good point on the CDOs. All I heard the first few months of what is turning into an epic disaster is “But they were AAA. They were safe.” Then you realized that the myopic risk managers woudn’t let anyone buy things except if it was stamped AAA by the in-the-tank ratings agencies. The answer to the question “wanna buy a trillion dollars worth of mortgages @ par?” was “Is it AAA? Yes! SHIP. IT. IN.”.
Morons.
Here at the Really Big Bank Whose Share Price was Down 25% Today, we had perfected the better fool morons.
Of course had they been reading Lastango here @ DP they would have taken what meager steps they could to try to protect themselves. But of course, they were watching The Office instead.
Martin, those are good points about blame to be spread around. The best advice I have to offer is: let them sink. That’ll punish the incompetent management and the corrupt unions and the local pols. The national pols and the lobbyists will escape direct punishment from the bankruptcies, but perhaps we can take up a collection to bus out-of-work UAW members to DC, sledgehammers in hand.
As for the capable workers laid off through no fault of their own, they’ll probably be able to get a job with whoever buys up the factories and staffs them with non-union workers.
There. Problem addressed in two minutes. Now can the blabber-mouthing congressmen and the poor-mouthing Big Three execs please STFU?
What do you mean by “guaranteeing a right to work”?
No more closed shop states. It means that union membership is completely voluntary, you don’t have to join one to work. The unions have shown that they are even worse with a monopoly than management.