GM and the union

The United States is the world's biggest market for the automotive industry. As sales plummet, more companies are tightening up their belts.

Next year will "definitely be a tough year for all automakers," Yoon Mong Hyun, Hyundai's planning director, told reporters in Hong Kong today. Under the company's most optimistic forecast, U.S. sales may hit 14 million, he added.

U.S. auto sales plunged to the lowest monthly total in 17 years in October, as rising job insecurity and higher borrowing costs caused drivers to slash spending on new vehicles. Still, Hyundai has sidestepped the worst of the market collapse as consumers are favoring its fuel-efficient small cars over General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. sport-utility vehicles.

While American's are not only holding back on purchasing new automobiles, they are also driving less with the one's they currently own.

...gasoline consumption has fallen compared with a year earlier in every month from March through September of this year, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Vehicle miles traveled -- the wonky term for how much we drive -- have dropped for 11 straight months, and fell 4.4% in September, according to the Department of Transportation.

What's the problem? Well, the Wall Street Journal is claiming that the unions are killing the industry.

....why Ford and GM managed to build viable auto businesses all over the world but not in North America.

You don't need the Hubble telescope to tell the answer: The UAW is present only in the U.S., not all over the world.

The big bad unions. What have unions in general or the UAW specifically done for anyone?

Well, as The Nation points out in an article entitled Hands Off the UAW they have managed to acheieve a few things over the past seventy-plus years.

It was the UAW that fought for national healthcare and pensions and, when those policy initiatives were blocked by reactionary Congresses, forced corporate America to create a social safety net for workers and retirees that would form the model for union and nonunion workplaces across the country. It was the UAW that fought government- and corporate-sanctioned racial discrimination, integrating Southern factories, supporting the 1963 March on Washington and bailing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail in Alabama. It was the UAW that withdrew from the AFL-CIO in the 1960s and '70s rather than take labor's big right turn; the UAW that opposed the Vietnam War; set up a research department that studied the cost of bloated military budgets to domestic progress; opposed apartheid in South Africa with such passion that when Nelson Mandela toured the United States after his release from prison, he insisted on celebrating with Dearborn's UAW Local 600.

I'd say that is quite a bit, really. It isn't as though the UAW is standing in the way of GM getting back on its feet. In July, the UAW allowed GM to defer $1.7 billion of payments for the VEBA for two years -- in exchange for a note paying 9 percent interest. VEBA is the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association which is a trust created to take over the estimated $80 billion retiree health care liability of the big three automakers in Detroit and safeguard retiree health care for 80 years.

In addition to the VEBA, the UAW has voluntarily reduced hourly pay and benefits for new hires cutting down to roughly $26 from about $78.

In the ten years they have been working together, the UAW and the Make-A-Wish foundation have granted 10,000 wishes for ailing children. I'd say that is giving something back to society.

Of course, it is common to need to point to a bad guy. It is even more common for the large corporate interests to claim the problem is with the lower classes. With the workers. But it just isn't true.

The workers aren't the problem here. Blaming them is just avoiding the truth and scapegoating the people who are getting hurt the most already.