Special Report: The UAW's last stand

al Reuters ^ | 12/29/11 | Bernie Woodall, Ben Klayman and Jan Schwartz

[markomalley]

The United Auto Workers union is staking its future on the kind of struggle it hasn't waged since the 1930s: a massive drive to organize hostile factories.

This time, the target is foreign car makers, whose workers have rebuffed the union repeatedly. Specifically, Reuters has learned, the union is going after U.S. plants owned by German manufacturers Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG, seen as easier nuts to crack than the Japanese and South Koreans.

It's a battle the UAW cannot afford to lose. By failing to organize factories run by foreign automakers, the union has been a spectator to the only growth in the U.S. auto industry in the last 30 years. That failure to win new members has compounded a crunch on the UAW's finances, forcing it to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for its activities.

In dozens of interviews with union officials, organizers and car company executives, a picture has emerged of UAW President Bob King's strategy. By appealing to German unions for help and by calling on the companies to do the right thing, King hopes to get VW and Daimler to surrender without a fight and let the union make its case directly to workers.

Central to this effort is the belief that if car companies refrain from actively opposing a UAW organizing push, workers at German-American factories will gladly join the union.

But that belief may be off-base. Workers know that almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company, while almost every job gained has come at a non-union company. And most of the factories the UAW is targeting are in the South, which is historically hostile to unions.

[Fresh Wind]

FTUAW.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Actually, the most unpleasant and obnoxious co-workers are invariably the union stewards. Total sheisskopfs.

[mcshot]

I’m still dumbfounded that 0 was able to fire somebody and they listen to him. Where does he get that power? He should have been told to suck off.

[taildragger]

I am not concerned about the UAW...

I am concerned with the shell game that is GM and will they go broke again.

They are "Stuffing the Pipe" and no one will talk about it in the lame stream, business, or auto meeting.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/gm-channel-stuffing-surges-all-time-record

"In the past two months, everyone has been scratching their heads just how it is possible that the US manufacturing base continues to chug along at pre-recession levels even as the world all around America burns? Today, GM may have given the answer, courtesy of its monthly disclosure of car sales which at the top line is completely irrelevant as the funding for these purchases comes almost entirely from subprime loans handed out by the government to NINJAs. What is interesting is the little blurb in every monthly report discussing the amount of dealer inventory, a topic well-known to frequent readers of Zero Hedge which has discussed GM's pervasive channel stuffing in the past, and which subsequently went quite mainstream. So how does November channel stuffing stack up? As the chart below shows, at 623,666 cars, it is an all time absolute record, and represents about 3.5 times the total GM vehicles sold in November! It is also a 31k increase in the past month, and 85k cars more in inventory than in July. Because when economic growth at all costs is needed to demonstrate just how viable America is, and a semi-nationalized car marker is one of the only conduits to "generate" economic growth, it does not matter if the end product is actually demanded or will simply corrode and rust in some dealer showroom in perpetuity. After all it is the act of building the car that matters for various monthly PMI, CMI, regional Fed and GDP purposes. Pretty much exactly like in China's goal seeked "economy." So the next time someone asks just how is it that the miraculous US decoupling continues, please point them to this chart."

[Calvin Locke]

Great way to step up the internecine attacks amongst the candidates.

I think it would be counterproductive to keeping, let alone gaining additional support.

Thad McCotter (R, MI) appears on Dennis Miller often. A caller asked about the GM bailout, and he was, as expected, to be all for it, trying to shift the benefits to all the employees of GM suppliers in all the other states...

Just sayin'.

OTOH, I'm sure the Dems have all sorts of sound bites already.

Here's another case to really blame Bush43. He had the opportunity to deal with the GM problem toward the end of his last term, and iirc, the way it was put, "He didn't want to be the one associated with the end of an American Industrial Icon."

[chris_bdba]

I know people who work at the Honda plant in Marysville and the majority don’t want a union.The last time they tried this cr@p some of the larger make workers helped escort the organizers off the plant grounds.Sort of an out union the union goons.....LOL

[chris_bdba]

I know people who work at the Honda plant in Marysville and the majority don’t want a union.The last time they tried this cr@p some of the larger male workers helped escort the organizers off the plant grounds.Sort of an out union the union goons.....LOL

[Mountain Troll]

I just look at the price tag. Union made costs more and isn’t any better. I don’t mind paying for what I get, but I expect to get what I pay for. Unions don’t deliver.

[fhayek]

It looks like they will produce more cars than they can sell, propped up by the American taxpayer, until next November. Production numbers will look good. Employment numbers will look good. Union dollars will flow to the president’s campaign. The manure will not hit the fan until after Obama is safely re-elected, and even then, the taxpayer will again be the backstop. This kind of manipulation has been one of my main criticisms of government ownership of business. Fundamentally, such an arrangement always leads to a squandering of economic resources.