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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16705 messages, Last post on Nov 25, 2009 at 6:56 PM
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 12, 2008 4:43 pm) I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you blaming laissez-faire (not "laizze-fair", whatever that is) capitalism for the onset of the Depression? If you are, you should know that many economists would fault the Fed for keeping interest rates too low during the boom years of the late 1920s & then boosting rates after the 1929 market crash. Even if you don't think that Fed fumbling caused the Depression, you have to agree with almost every economist, Republican or Democrat, that sharp tariff increases, triggered by the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, dramatically deepened & lengthened the downturn. After we raised tariffs to keep out imports & protect our manufacturers, every other industrial country followed suit. As a result, global trade dried up & factories all over the world shut down. Bad government policy, not "greedy businessmen", transformed what would otherwise have been a 2-year recession into the legendary Great Depression. We actually were well out of the depression long before we entered WW2, Thanks to FDR. Not if you look at the unemployment numbers. Note that the unemployment rate in 1928, the last full year before the Depression began, was 4.2%. By contrast, the rate in 1940, which was the last year of FDR's 2nd term, was 14.6% - more than 3 times higher. Not until the wartime year of 1942 (Pearl Harbor was bombed in December, 1941) did unemployment approach the 1928 level. U.S. Unemployment Rates: 1920-2007 Clearly, the war effort put far more people back to work than FDR's New Deal programs did. Indeed, you could go a step further & argue, as I would, that WWII - not the New Deal - laid the groundwork for the prosperity that we enjoyed for the next 30 years. |
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Replying to: jimbres (Dec 12, 2008 6:53 pm) So why was the reason to enact the Sherman Anti Trust Act? To imprison Eugene Debs? Is this the Darwinism of capitalism? I agree that any spending, which tariffs would hinder, fueling the economy, therefore social spending/public works must also fuel the economy. If you were alive then social spending was tabu. However, spending on the war machine allowed those robber barons profit, hence it was OK then. The American were on rations and sacrificing. The corporations were doing their part too, making money from the war.
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I just read, in succession, On a Clear day you Can See General Motors, the John DeLorean book, and then Call Me Roger, about Roger Smith's tenure as CEO...oddly, altho the books are "unrelated", DeLorean tells about GM from 1956 to the late 1970s, and, for different reasons, the next book covers Smith from 1981 to 1990...read the books and they will explain in perfect detail why GM is in trouble...written 20 and 30 years ago, they could have been written yesterday...they are on point for the GM problems of this hour... GM has wasted hundreds of billions $$$ on the payroll of people who never should have had jobs to begin with...It would be like a Mom & Pop hardware store in a small town, where, instead of 2-4 employees, they had 50 and wondered why they can't make any money...GM should have jettisoned thousands of middle managers whose sole job was to aggravate those below them and push worthless paper forms around to look busy... The only shame is that those workers about to be jettisoned have made their lives around GM (Ford, too) but they will become the casualties of war...however, rather than see them for what they lost, you could also say that they had some mighty fat years in a job that never should have been created from the beginning... The automakers will now slim down to become half its size...Michigan will slowly work thru this but will still become a ghost town compared to what it was, and what ti was was an overemployed money waster... Kinda like a school system which grows from 1000 to 2000 students...you hire new teachers for the growing student body, but once the "boom class" graduates and the school shrinks back to 1000, you can eliminate the extra teachers as they are unnecessary...cruel to the teachers???...maybe, but when a system does not need you, it is criminal to keep somebody on payroll solely because "they have been there"...for the system it is an evolution, for the individual it is a revolution... The workers will be eliminated as they simply are no longer needed...the re-training they will be offered will be charity from us, but they better get motivated as there is no time to shed tears, life goes on... Monday of this week I spoke to the other lawyers in my office, saying that the Big 3 must go Chapter 11 now, to junk all their unnecessary debt and contracts...they ALL reminded me about the "ripple effect" to which I replied that the ripple effect does not matter, we cannot pay people to make (Big 3) cars that no one wants to buy...that was Monday... Today, after hearing that the UAW will not budge an inch until 2011, despite the possibility of bankruptcy, they ALL came in and said that the UAW can go to hell, and they ALL said that GM/Ford should file for bankruptcy TODAY and stick in up the UAW's collective behind... As time goes on, the whole UAW strategy may backfire, as folks who make much less than a UAW member may become quite resentful about buying a car made by someone who makes much more than they do...few cared while times were good, but now that the UAW is front and center on the news, even the average guy may get fed up... Then there really only WILL be 2 people who will buy Big 3...lemko and rockylee... |
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Replying to: jimbres (Dec 12, 2008 6:53 pm) Clearly, the war effort put far more people back to work than FDR's New Deal programs did. Indeed, you could go a step further & argue, as I would, that WWII - not the New Deal - laid the groundwork for the prosperity that we enjoyed for the next 30 years. They have doctored the unemployment rate, just as they have doctored the CPI (consumer price index). Its like comparing the steroid ball players of today to those of by gone eras. The rules of even baseball have been changed. Mounds lowered after the last 30 game winner, designated hitter, and many more. To conclude that Nixon era inflation was prosperity is insanity. S&L bail outs by Reagan. You just have to define prosperity and find the real driver in these metrics. I can argue and will argue that unions, which include the UAW, are responsible for the largest middle class in history. Free trade, pollute all you want zones like Hong Kong envy our middle class, as does China and their exploitation of workers, child labor, and God knows what else.
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Replying to: marsha7 (Dec 12, 2008 7:08 pm) I feel an executive order from our commander and chief, President Obama. |
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 12, 2008 7:05 pm) You've lost me, my friend. Are you PWI'ing again? My previous post was a response to points that you had made about the New Deal - specifically about how New Deal programs had purportedly pulled the economy out of the Depression. But the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, more than 40 years earlier, & is thus unrelated to the earlier discussion. If there's a point buried in this post, I'm afraid that I don't see it.
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The "financial" bailout will end up in the trillions. The potential Big3 bailout should be 40 billion or so. If we are willing to toss 1,000,000,000,000+ to wall street you would think that 40,000,000,000 would be small potatoes. Why is the average american more concerned with the money that would be used for salaries of blue collar folks then they are the 25x amount at least that will be spent on the lazy, greedy wall street morons who could care less about them? It looks like the UAW is making a stand. They are tired of making all the concessions while the management fat cats who have managed the company poorly get rich. Seems like a reasonable position to me. Let the management fat cats take cuts to their salary/benefits in order to save the company. Alternatively, maybe the UAW president has been in touch with some politicians who have assured him a bailout is coming so he comes out firing in order to take the initiative. Negotiating 101. I'm so tired of all this non sense about the autoworkers making Joe the plumber money. Say is isn't so Joe?
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Replying to: tlong (Dec 12, 2008 3:30 pm) Even I would oppose it if the company I was working for is a private organization. The owners can cook the books in whatever fashion they like and the labor has to suffer. But in a publicly held company where the CEO is also paid performance bonus, all the employees should be given a bonus on the same standard. By the way, the fortune 500 company my wife works for, and one which has not made a loss yet, but still sold off the corporate jets as the markets deteriorated, has performance based bonus across all employees, which is based upon how much profit the company made. She can get anywhere from 5 to 10%. This time around she is looking at 2% at the most.
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"Huntsville may be a more "upscale" city, whereas Detroit is, well, um, a city. It's a given that taxes are more in Mi."... cooter, I do seem to like your quotes and have a blast responding to them...even if I don't make any sense...  Detroit is a slum, plain and simple...it was like that when I went there in 1980 and even worse when I left in 1990...stupid damn mayors all screamed racism, when they only had to look in the mirror to understand why working people of ALL races were deserting the town like a tornado just struck...lousy management and some of the highest taxes around...a mere $60K home had taxes around $2-3K, and what you got for your money was affirmative action of the worst incompetent people available... The best way to see Detroit is in your rear view mirror...I defy ANYONE to find anything good to say about the City of Detroit, and rocky doesn't count...
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other reasons that WWII got us out of the Depression is the one reason no one likes to say, but truth is truth... The war removed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of (mostly) men from the US job market and sent them overseas to fight, and many of them were simply killed and permanently removed from possible job rolls...the war took our citizens in the prime of their lives and sent them out of the country...those that remained were working on the war effort...by the time the survivors came back in 1945, I am quite sure that the available pool of workers was much smaller than it was from 1935-1941...that is another way to alter employment, have a large portion of the workers simply killed as casualties of war...cruel thinking???...yes, but that does not change the fact that many potential job takers were permanently removed from the job rolls thanks to D-Day and other battles of WWII... They shall, however, ALWAYS be remembered as heroes who gave the ultmate sacrifice, but they were removed from the employment rolls nonetheless...
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