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United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)

16705 messages, Last post on Nov 25, 2009 at 6:56 PM
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Pick up anything in your house that's less than 20 years old and my bet is it was made overseas. We make hardly anything anymore. I call them corporate terrorists, super capitalists, the Gordon Geckos and the mysterious billionaire in the movie Network. America is just another place on the map to them. A place that, if you give them the opportunity, they will ruthlessly exploit for their own advantage. It's a game to them and the only thing that matters is whether they win or lose; and they only want to win. Capitalism is a good thing, but like government, it needs a system of checks and balances to work properly. And no folks, the 'free market' is not enough of a check. See monopolies, inside trading, deceptive advertising and price fixing as just a small sample of problems we humans bring to capitalism. A country can't remain properous if it doesn't MAKE things; manufacture stuff. Making things builds the social capital of a country. People figure out how to do stuff. Americans are mostly consumers now. We've brought along a generation (40 and under) that mostly doesn't know how to figure out stuff, (it's not their fault). Go figure. The real culprits are you those of you that purchase cheap foreign products from countries with no labor or environmental standards, the corporations that have lost any and all sense of civic duty, and, finally, the bought and paid for government that passed so-called "free trade" agreements with countries which the US could never fairly compete because of a lack of labor and environmental laws/standards. Simply put, no country can compete with another when the playing field is not level. If anything, then, the unions had the prescience and foresight to see this coming and did their best to prevent all the crap you are currently witnessing. And, as they originally intended, i.e. the so-called "free" traders, blame the unions. I find the hostility to unions here puzzling. Who outsourced jobs to foreign companies? The unions? No, the management. Saying the unions made them do it is like a young kid saying his sister made him hit her. And if the argument is that blue-collar workers should work for $1 a day, no health care, no benefits, and a ditch in the street for a sewage system, just like the people they're competing with jobs for, consider--would YOU? Henry Ford realized that unless he paid his workers a living wage, they wouldn't have enough money to buy his products. Corporations have forgotten that since then.
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Replying to: lemko (Jul 03, 2008 5:58 am) I was visiting with the Mexican fellow that helps keep my place weeded yesterday. His wife does not have a work visa or green card and cannot come to the US and work. She works in a factory in Tijuana that makes printed circuits for Sony. She makes less than $20 per day. She does have health care insurance and the reason she keeps her job there. Almost every Japanese Company has factories in Tijuana. They are taking advantage of NAFTA. Make the product, stick it in a Mexican truck with a low paid Mexican driver and deliver it anywhere in the USA. Eventually it will even out. I think the US worker will have to go down further than the Mexican worker will come up. No candidate is addressing this issue with any strong rhetoric. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Jul 03, 2008 6:31 am) |
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Replying to: fintail (Jul 03, 2008 7:44 am)
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Replying to: gagrice (Jul 03, 2008 8:17 am) Regards, OW |
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Replying to: gagrice (Jul 03, 2008 8:17 am) This is the problem with this version of democracy, elections trump what is best for a nation. |
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Jun 30, 2008 7:54 pm) Hope all is going well iluv ??? I haven't sold cars since the end of May. I'm selling AT&T's U-verse products through a contractor thus I'm a1099 employee. U-verse, is based on AT&T's "fiber optic" network. I'm making a little more money than I was in the car business and working a lot less hours. The banks drove me out of the car business because they wouldn't approve people for loans and some of those people that had border line credit had medical collections and the banks wouldn't look at the whole picture thus instead of Rocky, selling 15-20 cars a month the most I sold was 7 (2x) February & April. The U-verse product is the cutting edge & latest and greatest TV Programming, Internet, Home Phone, on the market today. I do not see myself doing this full-time for much longer but perhaps I may continue to do it part-time for some extra cash. I need to keep plugging away and find areal job with benefits but until we get new leadership in Washington, that will fix our "trade issues" I'm afraid this recession will continue !!! I'm sorry I don't get on edmunds as often as I should but to be quite honest all the UNION bashing and Anti-GM rhetoric has gotten old and I'm not going to waste time fighting my friends on the other side of the aisle. "The Rock" P.S. Gagrice, Pantex is going to lay-off 100 Security Police Officer's !!! |
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Replying to: rockylee (Jul 04, 2008 7:43 pm) Um, Rocky, I could be wrong, but I believe AT&T's product is a Fiber to the node, which carries the signal over the traditional copper wires to the customer's house. Our Verizon Fios carries a fiber optic signal right to the customers house, therefore it is superior.
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Jul 05, 2008 3:43 am) But Verizon is only putting it on the coasts. They are using their incomes from the flyover states to subsidize giving a good service product to certain areas. ATT is putting Uverse in this area in adjoining ATT phone service country and hopefully into adjacent communities. This will give the monopoly Timeless Warner a run more than DirectDish has.
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Replying to: rockylee (Jul 04, 2008 7:43 pm) |
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