Guest Post: "Anonymous" On The Battle Of Chattanooga

TTAC welcomes “Anonymous”, a former temp who worked in a Japanese transplant factory, as he presents his opinion on the effect of the UAW on the American auto industry and the significance of the Chattanooga vote.

Sit down with me, children, and let me tell you about some of the great things labor unions have done for this country. The forty-hour week, safer working conditions, the defeat of the Pinkerton “bulls”, and, well, that’s probably about it. Many of the advances credited to labor unions by people who never bothered to read a history book are actually due to legislation. That’s okay. History, as the man who once doubled the wages he paid his employees without the pressure of a union to make him do it said, is bunk.

Now let’s talk about what the UAW has done for American workers. It created the “job banks”, where people were paid to do nothing. It created the seniority system that paid people $100,000 a year to sweep floors while young people were mercilessly shuffled off into a low-wage “tier”. It ensured that every automobile built by its employees during a time when American automakers were in the fight of their lives came out of the factory at the highest possible labor cost while simultaneously offering the lowest possible quality, often because the cars were sabotaged by overpaid workers who were encouraged to despise their employer, their product, and their customer.

Not satisfied yet? Don’t forget the best part of all.

Every time the UAW won, America lost. It lost jobs. It lost skills. It lost the manufacturing floor space, the tooling, the machinery it needs to compete. And let’s get this straight: the problem isn’t the American worker. If you don’t believe me, then let’s take a ride to Greensburg, Indiana, so you can see for yourself.

Greensburg is where the Honda Civic and Acura ILX sedans are built. These vehicles are among the highest-quality manufactured products money can buy anywhere in the world. They are built by workers who have never held a union card. The majority of these workers earn a wage that allows them and their families to enjoy the middle-class lifestyle that some would have you believe is the sole province of the pampered union saboteurs in Detroit factories. Most of them started as “temps”, earning ten bucks an hour to do simple labor, but now they earn twenty-five or thirty dollars an hour or more. Their managers are often recruited from the factory floor, not from a fancy Michigan MBA system that perpetuates an officer/enlisted division between management and labor. Seniority is irrelevant. Excellence matters and leaders of teams are often chosen by those teams.

Of course, Greensburg, Indiana isn’t the only place you can find Americans living the American Dream by assembling “Japanese” or “German” cars. Non-UAW labor assembles some of the most popular vehicles in the country, and, to be frank, it assembles most of the higher-quality ones. These workers have rejected the UAW time and again ever since the first Accord rolled off the Ohio assembly lines, and they continue to do so every chance they get.

What can the UAW offer them? Nothing except thuggish intimidation. It is a parasite that destroys the host. Don’t believe the canard, often proffered by left-wing professor types who would weep self-pitying tears of pain and sorrow an hour into their first shift on an assembly line, that the existence of the UAW is all that keeps the “transplants” from turning their plants into Upton-Sinclair-esque halls of horror and workplace mutilation. To begin with, the right of American workers to safe conditions and dignity is guaranteed by the government, not the UAW.

But let’s say they’re right. What if the UAW is all that protects American workers in transplant factories from being forced to paint the cars using leaded paint and a brush? If the UAW dissolved permanently and the evil, slant-eyed Japanese Tojos started whipping the workers with steel-barbed instruments of torture while comically exchanging the letters “r” and “l” in their broken speech, how hard would it be to start a new union to which those abused workers would eagerly flock? You know the answer: it would happen in a heartbeat, and our beloved Chairman Obama would be the princeps among the resurgent Red tide.

(Before you start enjoying the idea of the above scenario too much, it should be mentioned that the senior managers at most transplant factories are homegrown Americans, by which we mean “white people” and “black people”. In the case of Honda, the major plants have been under “American” control for decades now. If Japanese psuedo-samurai were required to beat the workers and make them do calisthenics, they would have to be imported.)

Yes, a union would arise, were one needed, but that does nothing for the UAW itself, which has long since become a twisted, perverse organization devoted only to its own survival, a maggot of unimaginable proportions gnawing the flesh of a dying man, a factory in its own right, chewing its younger members into bloody pap so that its senior parasites can be richly fed. Why else would it fight so hard against the secret ballot and the established NLRB procedures? Why else would it openly intimidate men and women who simply want to work? Why else would it intimidate their families and their communities? If the UAW was anything besides an organized racket, preying on the young and the weak even while it destroys the factories in which they work, couldn’t it rely on the workers themselves to ask for it?

You know the answer to that, and so do the workers, and so does the UAW. Thankfully, the men and women who work for Volkswagen in Chattanooga have resisted the intimidation, the pressure, the baying of a blue-lapdog media, and they’ve voted for themselves. For their families. For their futures. And wherever the standard of bravery is raised, others will see it. The Volkswagen vote was a vote against corruption, against parasitical blood-sucking, against intimidation. Make no mistake: we may always need unions in this country. But we no longer need the UAW. If, indeed, we ever did.