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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16666 messages, Last post on Nov 10, 2009 at 9:45 AM
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Replying to: lemko (Jan 07, 2009 6:24 am) There are MILLIONS of well paid people in the USA. The Feds and State governments employ many millions of Union workers. The UAW is a small segment of the population. There demise will have little impact on the rest of the USA. Obama has said he was going to expand civil service jobs by close to a million. To keep this in perspective. The good paying UAW jobs at GM are about 70,000. Not sure how many white collar workers at GM. My guess is they will have a better chance at maintaining their standard of living. I listened to a GM engineer with 30+ years service. He claimed each time the UAW got a fat raise the company would trim the engineers wages and benefits. No love lost between the white and blue collars at the automakers. So much for the UAW bringing the standard of living up around them.
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Replying to: dieselone (Jan 07, 2009 6:33 am) I can relate to that. After 37 years in the AK Teamsters I was still number 2 on the seniority list in my unit. The senior technician retired the year after me on his 75th birthday. He could not afford to retire earlier with a 50 year old wife and 12 year old daughter. He loses over half his retirement so it will carry over to his wife. He is also getting $2300 per month SS until his daughter reaches 18 years of age. Hope he gets a few good years in retirement. I could not hang on to reach number one. I was tired of flying 3500 miles to work every 3 weeks. |
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Replying to: manegi (Jan 06, 2009 10:17 pm) Look at Argentina. Less than 100 years ago, it was one of the world's richest countries (#4 based on per-capita GDP). But starting in the 1930s, it closed off its economy & imposed tariffs on both imports & exports. Within 20 years, it was a 3rd-world country. Consumers suffer when an industry is protected. Prices go up while quality & selection go down. Once protected, an industry spends less time satisfying customers & more time seeking political influence so that it can continue to keep outside competitors at bay. Political maneuvering replaces the free market. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 07, 2009 6:38 am) use your common sense--if gm engineers lost wages and benefits after uaw hourly bargaining--do you think it might have prompted some of them to join the uaw and get them back--chrysler engineers were in the uaw. we even called the non-union white collar staff our unpaid union members. indeed the pattern of passing along the same uaw negotiated benefits to the white collar workers got so strong that we had groups of non union white collar workers suggesting what new benefits should be negotiated. i wrote the organizing leaflets for the tech center engineers warning them that what GM gave them by fiat was not guaranteed by a written contract. I spelled out that they were getting the same or better benefits to keep them from organizing now but that some day they could be taken away since there was no contract requiring GM to pay these benefits. well as you know they didn't listen. non union GM salaried retirees no longer have health care. GM couldn't afford it and they had no legal obligation in that regard. uaw retirees covered by a contract do--absent bankruptcy, establishing the vebas and national health care that is. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 07, 2009 6:38 am) I listened to a GM engineer with 30+ years service. He claimed each time the UAW got a fat raise the company would trim the engineers wages and benefits. As you know I was also an engineer with many years of service at GM and from the 80's thru the 90's it was the opposite of what you heard. Union got an extra holiday we got an extra holiday. Hourly got COLA (cost of living adjustment) we got COLA. etc. BUT in the early 2000's when GM started to restructure and downsize, salaried lost beni's before the UAW and then used that as a bargaining chip. What we were unhappy about, at least the ones who saw the vehicle balance sheets, was the huge overhead that was calculated into each vehicles cost. Sure lots of it was legacy but those cost kept us from putting in content. |
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Replying to: lumoy (Jan 06, 2009 2:41 pm) A majority of Americans - 54 percent - are dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States — the first majority in three polls since 1993, and up 10 points since 2000. Not so good, right? Yet, among insured Americans, 82 percent are satisfied with their health care coverage. This if virtually the same percentage of Canadians who say that they are satisifed with their nationalized coverage. American dissatisfaction tends to stem from news stories that repeatedly tell them that the nation's health care system is "broken." Yet, the Americans who rely on those supposedly awful private insurance plans are satisified with THEIR plan - basically, as satisfied as Canadians are with their national plan. This is the more important - and telling - statistic, as it reflects citizens' actual experiences with a health insurance plan. Equally significant is that among insured people who've experienced a serious or chronic illness or injury in their family in the last year, an enormous 91 percent are satisfied with their care, and 86 percent are satisfied with their coverage. These are people who actually had to rely on their insurance coverage, and are satisfied with their coverage. lumoy: i started down that road simply to point our how our obsolete health care system has put domestic mfgrs at a comparative disadvantage to foreign mfrs--using the now well documented fact that a same car built in windsor ontario car costs $1800 more to build than the same car built across the river in michigan by the same company--thanks to the difference in health care costs. And I have raised three points that need a response, and still have not received one from you on any of them: 1. Please compare the benefits provided under the UAW negotiated plan to those provided by the Canadian national plan. I think we will all discover why the UAW plan costs more. 2. Please compare the cost of the health care plan provided by the transplant operations in the U.S. to the cost of the Canadian plan, along with the benefits provided by each plan. 3. If nationalized care is so much better, then why hasn't the UAW allowed the companies to shift retired blue-collar workers to Medicare, the American national health plan for senior citizens? It would save the companies a ton of money. It would allow the UAW to put its money where its mouth is and take advantage of a nationalized health care plan. lumoy: we have no apparent problem with the fact that the top 1% have upwards of 50% of the country's national wealth and at least since 1980 that the top 5% should get tax breaks in hope that it would trickle down to the rest of us. yet let a factory rat making $28-30 an hour having access with is family to a summer retreat and family education center with a golf course paid their own dues--and the right wing goes nuts. First, it isn't just the "right wing" that is going nuts. A recent survey showed that a majority of Democrats - 55 percent - oppose this bailout. Second, if one reason these companies are going broke is because of their uncompetitive cost structure, and a big part of the problem is costs stemming from work rules and gold-plated health care plans, it is not unreasonable to ask that said companies and their union address these costs BEFORE receiving any taxpayer money. Third, whether I make $60,000 a year, or $60 million a year, this is MY money the federal government is using for a bailout, so if you and your union don't like these questions, then don't ask for any government money and instead work with these companies to solve the problems on your own. lumoy: i have for example tried to point out that the uaw is not asking the federal government to bail out its operations and help the uaw's poor financial health but no one seems to understand the distinction. Without this loan (which is really a grant - there is no way that GM and Chrysler will ever pay it back), GM will file for bankruptcy, and Chrysler will be broken up and sold to other companies. At that point, the UAW will be hanging on for its life - especially when Ford demands the same wage and benefits package that GM pays its workers when it emerges from bankruptcy. This "loan" is as much about saving the UAW as it about saving GM and Chrysler. GM will still exist after it goes through a bankrutpcy reorganization. Chrysler's components - Jeep, the minivans, the Dodge Ram - are valuable to other companies, and will still exist after the company is sold off to other companies. The UAW's chances for survival in these scenarios, however, are quite slim. So, by any realistic standard, this "loan" is about bailing out the UAW as much as it is about bailing out GM and Chrysler. Without this "loan" there is a good chance that the UAW dies. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it's...a duck, no matter how desperately the UAW and its supporters want to pretend otherwise.
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Replying to: manegi (Jan 06, 2009 8:38 pm) i will have to admit, when i thin of japanese mass transportation, i think of those guys that shoved people into the subway cars. anyways, better to get the 'scoop' from you! 
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 06, 2009 5:51 pm) You know gagrice, all this back and forth on healthcare between you and lumoy is exactly what we see in debates all across this country, as to who should carry the burden of the costs, but we should be looking at the people who hand out the bills and say WTF with these double digit increases in premiums, when inflation is nowhere near these increases in terms of %. I don't know about elsewhere, but here in RI you have only 3 choices: BCBS of RI, United Health, or Tufts (sounds like the auto industry 50 yrs ago). No incentive to keep cutomers as there is nowhere else to go, so they have you over a barrel. Maybe we need nationwide competition between these companies, and maybe that will hold these premiums in check. No matter what, SOMETHING has to be done.
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 06, 2009 8:04 pm) Gagrice, isn't that HIS problem though???? A company does benefit paying a $30/hr employee $45/hr for the OT, as this work is being done cheaper than if they hired a new employee to do that job. It is up to the individual to understand that if you make $x per yr for a 40 hr week and they ask you to work 60-70 per week, that is NOT normal, and probably not permanent ( we can also argue the merits of whether it's safe too), and they should spend accordingly. |
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Jan 07, 2009 3:24 pm) A good point. In the cost of UAW retirees and current employees the increases in healthcare costs are ridiculous. The amount paid for a service by Medicare vs the amount billed to the Joe the Plumber who is paying is own bills is a ridiculous comparison. All payments should be at the same rate. The hospitals/providers try to make up from the paying customer what they can't get from the insurance agreements and the government payers (and the indigent to whom they provide services). One Cincinnati doctor whom I visited every six months explained why the adjacent large hospital was building or adding on big expansions all the time. He said the more they owed for the expansions the higher the payment rate from Medicare/Medicade they got. If they had less debt, they got less payment. A local hospital tells individuals paying their own billing to contact the office for a rate reduction on their bill if they wish--I take that to mean they'll adjust it down to what they get paid by insurance companies. The current UAW cost problem is a small example of the major problem we all face. However the UAW has negotiated a sweetheart deal when the car company MBAs didn't realize that healthcare costs would keep going up.
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