UAW Boss Big Ron Gettelfinger: We Work Faster Than Toyota
United Auto Workers’ (UAW) boss Big Ron Gettelfinger pops his head above the PR parapet every now and again to defend his members’ right to the wages and benefits that they’ve negotiated from Detroit’s failing automakers. But in the main, the UAW’s Big Cheese remains tight-lipped about the finer points of the union’s contract, strategy, golf course, JOBS bank, election process, internal dissent, balloting procedures, etc. (not to mention embezzlement and corruption). So when The Detroit News offered Ronny G unedited space within their precious pages, you’d hardly expect anything other than broad strokes (so to speak). You know: Wall Street vs. Main Street, investing in America; that sort of thing. One exception: Ron takes on the “myth” that UAW work rules rule the rotting roost. “According to the Harbour Report — the standard for measuring auto plant productivity — all 10 of the most efficient plants in North America are union plants. Union workers get the job done in less hours per vehicle than the competition. For example, according to 2008 Harbour data, it takes UAW members in Kansas City just over 19 hours to assemble a Ford F-series pick-up. It takes more than 32 hours to assemble the Toyota Tundra, a similar vehicle, at a non-union plant in Princeton, Indiana.”
I’ll leave it to TTAC’s Best and Brightest to deconstruct that argument. But it’s not bad. Nor can you fault the gist of this: “Cutting wages for middle class workers, for example, won’t do any good for the American economy — and it doesn’t do much for automakers, either, since labor costs are just 10 percent of the price of a vehicle.”
But then there’s this: “Instead, we need a strong stimulus plan — like the one planned by President-elect Barack Obama.”
And Ron concludes with this: “[Recovery] requires sound policies on incomes, trade and health care that will support working families — and renew the U.S. economy.”
Hang on fiscal conservatives and free marketeers; this is going to get rough. The rest of you: get ready to party like it’s 1999.
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@ Landcrusher Thank you for your thoughtful post. I think there's room for an improved balance a little further away from pure capitalism, but not on the route that has the citizenry feeling over taxed. Despite the regular snearing, the Scandinavians and many European countries seem to have a good balance. From my experiences in the USA, I've come to understand Australia has a good balance (but it could always be improved). From what I've seen in more than a few places in the USA, if you're born to an unemployed family, you're going to struggle to get education and nearly non-existent (for them) services like health care. That generational cycle of despair needs intervention to be somewhat improved over time. There's a long term social cost to leaving people behind no matter how hard it might seem, that's what isn't being added up correctly. Hence my own references to No Free Lunch. In this respect, I would consider myself to have an "advantaged" start in life. For the record, Gardasil's Prof Ian Frazer thanked the work done by US researchers some 20 years ago in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He also went on to lambast "Big Pharma" for furthering their own causes on derived work. They "stopped" because they wouldn't make money. In that respect, he believes a large amount of medical research belongs removed from the "profit motive". We have another Nobel Prize for Gastril Ulcers. Again those researchers had the very same complaints about Big Pharma. BTW, Gardasil is licensed to Merck from CSL because in Australia we can't possibly manufacture it in scale. So in that respect we're sharing....I guess. I've wondered about the world's fascination with Obama. I was in Frankfurt during October, and those people were very seriously interested. I think they understand that the US needs to lead the world in many respects, but also understand the USA needs to be fixed, not patched up. So after all that, I agree with a bailout attempting to soft land people about to be out of work. Something else has to be done to provide a different future for those people and hopefully outside of automotive manufacturing. Those jobs might not ever return. People like Mr Gettelfinger aren't part of the better balance that needs to be found.
Pete, On a scale of freedoms vs. equality, the US has pretty much been farther along towards freedoms than most anyone. I believe that, and our justice system, with all its warts, seems to be key to our success. You can't have freedoms without protections. Pure capitalism, as most people think of it, never works, and never really existed. It's a myth. I like to think that pure capitalism has protections against coercion. Not the other way round. Capitalism without any rules to keep the game going is really some sort of oligarchy. You are correct that being born into a family with no workers will mean that statistically, the child has a greater chance of ending up the same way. If you parse the numbers though, you find that it is really a complicated thing. Many of those children are simply going to go down that road because of genetic mental problems. I wonder if many of the western socialist countries do much better in reality. The scandinavian model simply cannot be replicated in the US. They are beneficiaries of some unrepeatable benefits. If you look at the western countries with large immigrant populations you see many of our problems developing over there as well. I don't know what the solution is, but I am rather sure that redistribution is a really expensive bandaid. It's one thing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but if you kill the chicken, cow, and sheep that feed you, that's another thing altogether. We have really low unemployment here, even in the bad times. I am not kidding that anyone can get a reasonable job if they are merely polite, punctual, and ethical. With time, almost all of them can increase their position or at least their wage. Only those that buy into the idea that they can't do it, really can't do it. Many people think that because they can't get a promotion at their present job, that they can't do better. Which is just laziness, in my opinion. Many people, especially women, get better positions by changing companies, not climbing up the same company ladder. I started working at a job that paid less than minimum wage (legally), and soon worked my way into management. Once I had to go begging any of my workers to take a promotion to be a first level manager. No one wanted the job because the extra pay was not worth the extra work! Many of these people lived in a part of town where that extra money would have gone a really long way towards helping their family situations. We may not be adding up the cost correctly, but it doesn't matter because we would still not agree to how to fix it. Our left loves to try programs to fix things, and inevitably, they make them worse. There is a cost to social programs that often doesn't get calculated either. It's the cost of keeping people down by making them think they NEED help. Welfare reform was one of the best things this country has ever done. We simply MADE many people start working by threatening their checks. It worked brilliantly. How do you calculate the cost of all the people who could have been put back on track over the decades had our welfare system not gotten so liberal? Anyway, to wrap it up, I don't like the bailout if it just means cash for the companies. It's a bad policy. No matter what, the workers will have most of their retirement benefits protected. Those jobs likely will not last because of the labor laws in those states. It won't mean a softer landing, because most of the workers will not leave until they cannot stay. It's delaying the inevitable. More of them would be better off if those companies closed, and they were available for someone who can more effectively use their skills.