Posted on 06/01/2009 8:42:55 PM PDT by St. Louis Conservative
Decades of dumb decisions helped send General Motors to a bankruptcy court yesterday, but one stands out.
The year was 1998, and the United Auto Workers was striking at two factories in Flint, Mich., that made components critical to every GM assembly plant in the country. The union was defending production quotas that workers could fill in five or six hours, after which they would get overtime pay or just, you know, go home.
Most strikes are forbidden during the life of a labor contract, so to provide legal cover the union started filing grievances. GM lawyers contended the walkouts violated the contract anyway and drafted a lawsuit -- the first by the company against the UAW in more than 60 years. But GM's labor-relations department freaked out because the lawsuit would antagonize the union.
Just think about that. The union had shut down virtually all of GM, costing the company and its shareholders billions of dollars, and yet the company's labor negotiators were afraid of giving offense. After heated internal arguments, the suit was filed and GM seemed on the verge of winning. But the company settled just before the judge ruled.
UAW members marched victoriously through downtown Flint. GM executives who advocated a tougher stand got pushed out of the company.
The picture of a heedless union and a feckless management says a lot about what went wrong at GM. There were many more mistakes, of course -- look-alike cars, lapses in quality, misguided acquisitions, and betting on big SUVs just before gas prices soared. They were all born of a uniquely insular corporate culture.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
A couple years before this..Caterpillar headed by CEO Don Fites faught off a long UAW strike and imposed an agreement on them when they returned to work. CAt was in a much better position to to it since they had strategically reduced the number of plants in IL with the UAW and had enough office staff, field staff and engineers to run the plants without the UAW. Everybody worked 12 hour days for a long time..and the mgmt employees were paid time and a half for overtime. They found out they could make the same product with fewer people and never took back the same number of UAW who walked out. I guess the car companies just couldn’t do the same thing. It took years of positioning to get there.
The unions are always whining that their main mission is workplace safety. I watched a piece on FOX news yesterday that was filmed on an assembly line. The union idiots were building cars dressed in T-shirts and shorts. None in the camera view had safety glasses or hard hats. I thought that it just looked a little weird for these guys who were assembling cars to be dressed like they were going to the beach.
Problem’s bigger than GM. The US is no longer a country where anything gets solved, just debated and band-aided endlessly until a crisis hits or the problem is beyond repair. Compare the U.S. that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor in a matter of months, sent men to the moon, etc. etc...
GM may be a great metaphor for the country the U.S. appears to have become.
“Romney on this mess...”
Romney and his fellow RINOS are a mess.
If the GOP had provided a consistent, compelling free-market alternative over the past two decades, we wouldn’t be where we are now. Obama isn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the feckless tweedle-dum GOP limp-wrists from Romney to Dole to McCain that have accommodated creeping socialism for decades. They’re as much to blame as anyone for the situation in which we find ourselves today.
Related thread:
GM: Its rise, fall and future (Founder was strongly anti-union)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2261996/posts
I went aboard with three workers. All from different unions in the yard. I had a pipefitter to pull the plumbing away from the pump, a electrician to disconnect the wiring from the pump and a laborer to pick the pump up.
My job was to point out which pump to service as none of the aforementioned tradesmen were allowed to read blueprints.
The yard went from 5,400 workers to 500 in 5 years.
apparently the UAW has told its members their base pay will not decrease and they will keep their health and pension benefits. Those that keep their jobs anyway. meanwhile this is unsustainable without huge amounts of govt stolen money
Workplace safety is what they always whine about when they want yet another gimme in a contract.
Unless they can get at least an 8-hour day out of these babies and get rid of crap like low quotas and job banks, GM will keep failing.
A relative of mine works for GM and said they were told they'd be losing dental and vision. Don't know if that's for current or retired employees.
I meant their core benefits, like base pay not necessarily other things like overtime
BMFL
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