#Uaw

Moody’s has been less than impressed with GM’s recent pension cuts/buyouts:

Calling Canada “ the most expensive place in the world to build a car right now“, Dan Akerson threw his hat into the “ hourly wage costs need to come down” ring at GM’s annual shareholders meeting on Tuesday.

Tennessee is so 2011 for the UAW. The hot new locale for foreign plant organizing campaigns is Mississippi, where the UAW is trying to organize workers at a Nissan truck plant.

The Big Three sent letters to the Canadian Auto Workers union Wednesday, asking them to forgo a small wage increase as a means of keeping Canadian plants competitive.

According to Automotive News [sub] and other media reports, the UAW is trying again to unionize Nissan’s Canton, Miss,, plant. A rally was held over the weekend. It is hard to believe that the UAW is serious, given the fact that it had tried two times, and failed two times.

The UAW can write off organizing Volkswagen’s U.S. plant in Chattanooga. The effort has been damned by German unions. Volkswagen’s works council will explain to Chattanooga workers that there is no pressure from German unions for them to join the United Auto Workers union. With Reuters taking notes, Volkswagen works council chief Bernd Osterloh offered the most lukewarm support he can afford to give as a union brother:

It’s said that people do resemble their dogs. The UAW surely looks more and more like the GM of old. For years, the UAW has spent more than it took, forcing it to live off its savings. Once again, the UAW wants to change this – two years from now. Until then, it will happily go on making losses.

A while ago, the UAW started passing out signature cards at Volkswagen’s factory in Chattanooga, TN. It looks like most landed in the garbage can.

With membership down to a quarter of the union’s peak size in 1979, dues are not enough to pay the bills at the UAW. The UAW continues to tap into savings to pay for its day-to-day operations, Reuters says.

When, in early February, the first (unconfirmed) rumors made the rounds that UAW’s Bob King would get a seat on Opel’s supervisory board, the assumption was that King will speak for “the equity side.” According to the “co-determination law,” the supervisory board of a large German company consists of 50 percent equity side and 50 percent labor, with the chairman having two votes in case of a tie. The UAW, through VEBA, owns 10 percent of the stock of GM. That puts King definitely on the equity side. One would assume.

In a surprise attack, the UAW has taken the first formal steps to unionize Volkswagen’s U.S. factory in Chattanooga. In what Reuters calls “an escalation of its effort to establish a foothold outside the Detroit automakers,” the UAW started passing out authorization cards for workers to sign. According to U.S. labor laws, the union needs signatures from at least 30 percent of the workers of a plant before a representation election can go ahead. The UAW’s timing could not have been worse.

Days after Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney penned an op-ed in the Detroit News over his thoughts on the bailout, UAW President Bob King is firing back.

With their campaign to organize foreign auto plants seemingly in the toilet, UAW President Bob King is embarking on a new task – creating “a movement for social justice”.

Even at Germany’s IG Metall metal workers union the daily BILD Zeitung was put aside today to make room for the fancy Wall Street Journal. The paper claims to have talked to “a GM official,” who thinks that all hell is about to break loose at Opel in Germany.