Sen. Harry Reid plugs in his detachable spine for “hundreds of thousands and millions of people” working in the auto industry
Posted By JM Bell on November 20, 2008
The almost unspoken consequence of failing to rescue the American Auto Industry is the loss of a crap load of jobs. Now, while the GOP and the Industry executive are calling this whole fiasco the fault of the Unions, I have two points.
- The are a lot more than Union jobs on the line. From dealership workers, to truck drivers, to the guys at the car wash, the loss of these bloated, mismanaged companies would be detrimental.
- The Unions don’t set policy, forecasts or business planning. They build the cars. They build the parts. They do the work.
That we still need unions shows that, left unprotected, the American workforce is vulnerable to attack and exploitation by the modern Robber Barons. Union busting is flaring out of the pious gobs of the GOP and the modern Robber Barons is, at best, a completely juvenile lie in order to place blame on the innocent.
Why do Republicans get so pissy about pensions? Health insurance? Living wage? Union men and women do the job, hold up their part of bargain after bargain, and they are cast as villains by right wing ideologues that worship monetary gain above all things, including their false Christianity.
One look at worker payroll vs. executive payroll, including bonuses of all types, shows that while a union worker can make a pretty good living, they are far, far from making a killing.
When the auto industry tanks, Union workers, past and present, are the victims of executive management* who don’t either suffer the same fate and/or, get enough money for their business killing management that a couple of years unemployment won’t have them living in their cars (that they import from Europe).
The best ideas I’ve heard on the Auto Bailout all concern canning management, capping salaries for executives and killing the hundreds of millions of dollars of golden parachutes that these corporate looters pay for with the sweat of the Union worker and the “profits” that they’d probably have if they weren’t so busy giving each other million dollar checks as party favors.
The American Auto Industry leadership has failed for decades. They have also been given many opportunities to change their business models over a long period time and have instead purposefully grabbed at short term gains to the detriment of the American economy.
In my eyes, this is treason. It’s an open declaration of war upon the AMERICAN PEOPLE for money. All this talk of it being the fault of Unions is nothing more than trying to shift blame. It’s like saying that the Enron collapse was the fault of dinosaurs.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:
We all can throw all the barbs we want at the three people who fly down here on their corporate jets. But we’re concerned not about them, we’re concerned about the hundreds of thousands and millions of people who are involved in the automobile industry who want these jobs and who need these jobs, we want them to have the jobs. We want them to work and come up with a proposal that we can get through here by Dec. 8. (h/t Crooks and Liars)
I have to jump in here – the fed should in no way bail out the auto industry. Like you said – “The American Auto Industry leadership has failed for decades”. Bailing them out, even with caps on salary or whatever other socialist (yes, socialist) policies will do nothing but delay the inevitable and further piss off the conservative majority of this country – something the democrats really can’t afford to do if they hope to hang on to the first real power they’ve had in decades for more than 2 years. Not to mention the fact that it’s wrong and won’t work anyway. The executives who get their salaries capped will move on to become executives in industries that aren’t capped. They will be more credible for having pulled off a bailout plan. The Auto industry will get second rate executives (willing to work for capped salaries) that might delay the inevitable collapse for a year or two.
We HAVE to let it fail, for all the right reasons. The executives will have a much harder time finding work with a resume that includes overseeing the collapse of their own industry. Unions will have to be a lot more considerate of the consequences of their demands (face it – the Union leaders aren’t blameless here). And yes, the American worker will (again) pay a hard price. It sucks, but propping up something that’s so clearly broken is just stupid. There MUST be real consequences for any real change to happen – the financial bailouts should be proof enough of that. Billions of dollars of tax payer money at risk to salvage an industry that screwed themselves, and all we got was a line of other industries out the door looking for a hand out.
A failing industry is not the end of the world, and there’s a lot of opportunity for (real) Americans. There will be auto plants and machinery for sale (at clearance prices!) to the entrepreneurial workers of those plants. There will be government and venture capital handouts to produce “Green” cars. Hell, any cars to fill the massive void. There will be a highly skilled work force bending over backwards to help those start ups succeed (probably without the Union overhead). There’s even the possibility that those Union workers will pull their damn heads out and create employee-owned corporations. It has the possibility to give birth to an innovative, competitive, and flexible car industry in the US – something we haven’t actually seen since the early 70’s. (I mean c’mon – our Auto industry said it was impossible them to produce cars with the fuel efficiency California wanted to demand. They said they wouldn’t be able to do it next 10 years, maybe 20. And they said this while Japan was -planning- on meeting those standards within 2 years.) It will do for the automotive industry what micro-brews did for the beer industry. And it’s called the free market – something the vast majority of blue collar workers in this country profess to support every Sunday as they condemn you damn liberals to hell. Sadly, they’re as right as they are self defeating.
So yes, not bailing out the auto industry will be painful, detrimental to the markets and our country as a whole. But if we’ve learned nothing else from the past 8 years, we should have learned this: Doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons out of FEAR of the consequences is a recipe for disaster.
Allow me to jump in and give a very personal perspective on the vast majority of unions.
I setup time and attendance software all day long. It’s my job to take the client’s pay and attendance policies and translate that into something our software can do. Whenever I hear “union rules”, I get a cold shiver up my spine because I know what kind of personal hell I’m in for.
In short, unions negotiate a set of byzantine rules with seemingly little purpose other than to frustrate the hell of anyone in HR, payroll or a related field. It reminds me of those crazy riders that rock stars make (”3 boxes of Count Chocula, one dozen unsharpened number three pencils and a hot tub filled with glycol heated to exactly 102 degrees”) just to see if they can get away with it. If the purpose is to negotiate better compensation packages for employees, I don’t see how creating rules that require the purchase of expensive software and hiring someone to maintain it is going to accomplish that. (Don’t even get me started on the weird stuff that school districts have to do for their unions.)
Given that I’ve gotten to see a glimpse of the sausage factory, I’m more than willing to blame unions for at least some of this mess. (Note that I’m not letting auto makers off the hook for being lazy chumps that bet big on SUVs and lost.)
Jake – I understand all your points, and I agree with most of them. I can not, however, see how dumping a couple of million folks into the unemployment line with little to no hope for a couple of years of finding a job won’t have a crushing effect on every America’s way of life.
Crime rates go up when children are hungry. I’d steal for my kids, and I know that you would, too. Crime rates go up when there’s no money, because sometimes a kitchen floor just has to be refinished.
(inside joke)
That’s why I like Reid talking about a “plan.” Show how you pull your head out of your ass and we’ll have a vote. Your example of Asian automakers retooling model lines in months vs. years is a great example of what I would consider a workable plan.
Barring that? Call me a socialist all you want, but, I say Federalize the whole damn thing and point it toward infrastructure, at bargain basement prices.
Jesse – Everyone has a story about Unions like that, and, it’s no less true for being silly.
Go back to your elementary school history books and look at life in America before the Unions. I was in a Union. I found a lot of weird rules and didn’t like them. What I did like was that my pay and benefits were protected. That I couldn’t lose my job because I got sick, or because I got hurt. That I didn’t have to work in dangerous conditions.
OH! And, giving in to my internal greed daemons, I loved the overtime rules. Fantastic.
Yeah, there’s a lot of silly rules that the Unions negotiate, but, 95% of the job of a Union is to have my back. I think that that is important. You, as a scab, are just jealous.
Unions made a difference, but I think that the establishment of many state and federal protections has caused many of them to outlive their usefulness. They’re also victims of mission creep and spend far too much in the way of time and resources outside of the core mission: negotiating compensation with an employer.
My point is that by creating all of these rules and jacking up the cost of HR and payroll, the unions can have some significant negative effects on the company bottom line without much in the way of benefits to the employee bottom line. My wife’s company would have to increase the payroll department from 2 to 5 employees should the Employee Free Choice Act pass. This says nothing of the additional overhead created at plant locations. It’s one thing if employees are truly being abused (nursing and IT could really use some organizing), but many of these guys would happily kill the cow if they thought it would give them an extra glass of milk.
Some unions (the IBEW comes to mind) are awesome because they are more like professional organizations that also focus on training and education. Most of the others (I’m looking at you, UAW) demand exorbitant amounts for employees who, as a group, barely have the qualifications to work at Taco Bell.
Then I name thee “Pinko-Communist-Socialist-Liberal” (and federalizing it = worst idea ever).
Without a doubt crime will go up. There’s no way around it, the failure of the auto industry in the US is going to be painful – now, or 4 years from now after the bailout.
The problem is simply that you can’t keep the same people and the same system in place and expect it to change. You can’t give *GM* billions of dollars to retool their plants and expect their business model to get better. But you can sell their plants to the engineers running them, and ask those guys to build a better car. You can’t cap executive pay and expect those same executives to make better decisions. But you can offer business loans to line managers to start new companies (employing the engineers), and expect that THEY will make better decisions. We can not, as a nation, reward the failures of entire industries with second chances at taxpayer expense. It didn’t work for the financial / insurance industries, it’s not going to work for any other industries, and it WILL bleed the federal coffers dry. We need our government to fund the growth of our nation, not pay off private debt. [If the fed isn't going to pay off MY credit card, why should I let them pay of GM's credit card?]
You want a plan? I’ll give you a plan. Use the *billions* in bailout money to do the following:
1) Open those closed military bases as re-education centers. Citizens can live there for cheap (or free) while they learn new trades & look for work. BUT… they have to run the base like they were in the military (complete with exercise – the fat bastards…). Yes, they’d have to run the chow hall, cut the grass, take drug tests, and so on, but it’s better than living in a box, or prison, and great for networking. They can be mostly self sustaining (soccer moms or dads can run the day care and school programs while their significant others train, etc.). I don’t think many Americans would have too much of a problem with this and it would certainly take some of the strain off of losing your job with a family in tow. (These would NOT be homeless shelters, you’d have to perform and pull your weight. And you’d expect to be there for at least 3 months).
2) Fund start ups
3) Improve our transportation infrastructure (railroads primarily) so people can get to where the jobs are, and businesses can get their products to the customers. Use people from #1 to build it. That’s 10 year of national growth, easy. And constitutionally sound.
4) Cap the cost of a college education for any school that gets federal funding – if we can’t educate our poor, we’ll never maintain a middle class.
And we’d still have billions left over. Which we’d probably waste on tissues for all you cry-babies.
This is why I support the Bailout:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle/Tesla-Roadster/236128/
Lets give some money to these guys and see where we are in a few years.
Joncan – you support the bailout so Tesla motors can make $100,000 electric cars for rich guys (for a mere 400 million pay-out)?! That’s hardly fair to Fisker motors, who’s producing $80,000 electric hybrids for rich guys.
Instead of bailing them out for hundreds of millions each, why not give 10 million each to the hundreds of start ups (like phoenix motocar, Th!nk, Loremo, Mindset, ad nausium)? Or none at all? Propping up failing, expensive and large industries is just making it harder for the little guys to get their shot.
I’m just sayin’…
Jake- So I had a pretty good answer to your post, but then I got distracted and browsed away. So here is the gist…
Yes the Tesla currently produces a Roadster that costs $110,000. But that’s because right now it isn’t being mass produced. They are built to order for people like me who want something Sexy, fast and NO GAS. Oh, and they’re usually rich.
I just want the price to come down to something more reasonable. If we can get them mass producing their engine, 248 peak horsepower (185kW) and 276 ft/lbs (375 nm) of torque, then the price will come down. Isn’t that the goal?
I looked at the others you mentioned and, yes, let’s give them some money too. I would love a full electric truck from Pheonix. Then I can get rid of my s-10. But they only get you 100 miles on one charge compared to the Tesla 220.
Think would be cool if they were still an American company, or if their car actually looked like something I would want to drive. Also, get rid of the monthly fee for batteries.
Loremo- sexy, but German. And only 95 miles on a charge.
Mindset- Swiss Hybrid. Still uses gas.
The only reason I brought up Tesla is because that is the type of investment I want my government to be making. And from what I can tell, they’re going to spend the money it’s just a question of where.