UAW wants bigger cut of Detroit's newfound profits

Yahoo Finance ^ | 07/24/2011 | AP

[ThinkingBuddha]

And so it begins again.....

[EGPWS]

Wish in one hand and **** in the other...

[Chuzzlewit]

yep. same as it ever was, until the next time some chump like our President bails them out.

[Americanexpat]

This is the kind of crap that has ruined our country.

[Nachum]

The list, ping

Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list

http://www.nachumlist.com/

[nascarnation]

One very misleading stat:

The UAW is eager to boost its ranks with more new hires. Its membership has fallen to 376,612, about a quarter of the 1.5 million it had at its peak in 1979.

The number of UAW auto workers has gone down much more than that. The 376,612 includes a lot of medical, state, and local employees who have unionized.

[PGR88]

I predict: GM WILL go bankrupt again. they have become a political organization tied to the Gov’t as much as they are a private industrial company. And like all such entities, they will need to come back to the Gov’t again for help.

That means they have until election day 2012.

Don’t hold GM stock any longer than that!!

[Niuhuru]

Greedy hogs; the company is finally getting out from under water, but go figure, the workers (haha) want the profits instead of letting the company make their own money and then get on a solid profit structure, they insist on taking it as soon as it comes in. Go freaking figure and people wonder why companies are moving overseas.

[Lazlo in PA]

"Management's not the enemy at this point," says Jim Graham, a longtime local union president in Lordstown, Ohio, where workers make the Chevrolet Cruze car. "The enemy is the competition."

Yeah right. Why would "management" be the enemy when the unions and Obummer are basically management? How do these dopes have the balls to be looking for more goodies when new car sales are in the toilet? These Gov't companies are still in a death spiral.

[freejohn]

Now that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are making money again, workers want compensation for their sacrifice.

I had just heard a news report on this before I saw your post.

The way they (UNION) put it .. "It's time for them to get well after all their sacrifice"!

[Wally_Kalbacken]

"Now that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are making money again,..."

This is the level of superficial journalism which helps get you to the point we were at in 2008-2009 in the Big Three. Recently there has been a lot of reporting on the fact that Chrysler paid back loans which it received in in the post bankruptcy bailout. And generally speaking, that it true of the debtor-in-possession financing that the Treasury gave them. What is not much talked about is the $17.8B which was disbursed by the Bush Administration in December 2008 to stave off the imminent collapse of GM and Chrysler. That money went bye-bye when the companies filed their respective bankruptcy cases.

I don't see any significant change for the big three and the UAW. What is interesting (and stupefying) is why VW would be so receptive to the UAW at their new Chattanooga plant. They will regret that.

[griswold3]

“The enemy is the competition.”

Tell your UAW friends to prepare, Mr. Graham. Honda, your so called ‘competition’ here in Ohio is preparing to capture significant market share. Reviving up production to pre-tsunami numbers next month. Deal with it, like the rest of us in the Real World.

[ken5050]

VW in Germany is heavily unionized. Under German law, unions have several seats on the company's board of directors. There is NO way that VW could avoid the UAW..

Has there been a vote for the union at the new plant?

[ken5050]

All the problems of the big Three the lst 25 years can be teaced directly to the long ago failure to let Chrysler go belly up...

[ken5050]

All the problems of the big Three the last 25 years can be traced directly to the long ago failure to let Chrysler go belly up...

[dfwgator]

All the problems of the big Three the last 25 years can be traced directly to the long ago failure to let Chrysler go belly up...

Yep. The precedent was set that Government would not let any company "Too Big to Fail" go belly up, and it's a major factor in ruining our economy.

[Wurlitzer]

When you have such an inferior intellect as to join a union it follows that you have learned nothing during this economic downturn and are bent on repeating past mistakes.

[Little Ray]

You do know that, thanks to Obama screwing the bond holders, the UAW owns a significant portion of GM (dunno ‘bout Chrysler, but probably them, too)?

[EQAndyBuzz]

UAW workers compensation, including medical benefits total $51.00 per hour.

Given 25 percent of benefits go towards medical, a union worker is still getting paid 75k a year. Nice work if you can get it.

[truthguy]

The UAW members, particularly the old ones didn't make much of a sacrifice at all. It was the taxpayers who made the sacrifice. I'm not surprised at all by this. The average UAW member is an economic ignoramus. GM should have been allowed to go through a standard Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But this would have killed off the UAW. The UAW is the problem and has been for a very long time.

One thing is for certain. We are now in a world economy. People have choices and now they have knowledge. This is no longer 1965 where the big 3 were just about the only choice for the consumer.

The other thing that's for certain is that the UAW will not exist in another 10 years or so. Either the workers will come to their senses and reject the UAW or the UAW will kill off the auto industry and there will be no UAW. If we are to have a domestic auto industry, we cannot have the UAW, at least in its current form. The workers must understand this. If they cannot look around them and see all the imports on the highway, then they are as dumb as a box of rocks.