Concession Time: What will the UAW throw off to keep the Big Three afloat?

The National Review ^ | December 3, 2008 | Stephen Spruiell

[2ndDivisionVet]

Unreal! No wonder they're going out of business!

[ken21]

according to a recent wsj article,

there are a combined 190,000 big 3 auto union employees

supporting 600,000 retired union employees.

and how do the big 3 compete with the euros and asians?

[llevrok]

How about throwing off $50/hour to start?

[verklaring]

Correction of title: What will the UAW through off to keep their jobs and union afloat?

[verklaring]

sorry, throw not through.

[ensignbay]

Unions are a microcosm of socialism on a per-company basis. They are bleeding their hosts dry and are too greedy to acknowledge it.

What ever happened to pride in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work?

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/we-demand-true-conservative-leadership.html

[SkyDancer]

Just wait - SS is on the same road ... pretty soon there will be more people on SS than working people supporting it ...

[sickoflibs]

Have you noticed how fast democrats turning on Big-3 publicly when the polls showed the bailout was unpopular, and republicans decided not to get setup again?? Now they are demanding stuff. The delay is killing them because now they want 45B, but a few weeks they demanded 25B and democrats claimed it was just a loan/investment. See, post GWB, post-McCain wont be that bad. Democrats finally have to explain their actions.

[1rudeboy]

Every member of the UAW, management on down, should get on their knees and apologize to those 600,000.

[madison10]

Peter Morici is a professor of international business at the University of Maryland. In late November, he testified before the Senate Banking Committee, alongside the CEOs of the Big Three automakers and United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger.

“The real problem here is that [Banking Committee chairman Chris] Dodd doesn’t understand the scope of the severance payments that the UAW gets,” Morici tells me. “They go in the jobs bank and they stay there forever. My feeling is that [the Big Three] are at fault for letting the jobs bank continue after these last labor negotiations and agreeing to $105,000 buyouts. The whole situation is absurd.”

The buyouts of that size ($105,000) are one time only, come from the pension fund and equal three years of pension, with no continued health care after leaving the automaker. If a person agrees to take that amount that is the only pension they will get. In the long run the large payouts are, of course, less expensive than paying the pensions for life.

No one "stays in the jobs bank forever." They really don't exist anymore.

Can't wait until the MSM asks for bailouts. They are fear mongers and liars.

[BenLurkin]

Here's a hint: Before the unions give up anything they will want assurances from Obama that a Federal Program (paid for by tax dollar's) will takes it's place.

So...giving up company health care? Or pension? Only if the Feds step in to take it's place.

Whats’ worse — it's going to happen..

[BenLurkin]

Here's a hint: Before the unions give up anything they will want assurances from Obama that a Federal Program (paid for by tax dollar's) will takes it's place.

So...giving up company health care? Or pension? Only if the Feds step in to take it's place.

Whats’ worse — it's going to happen..

[RC2]

Are you saying that $70/hour is not fair for putting a bumper on a car? If the auto workers want to keep their companies solvent, take a pay cut. If they don’t care, they will loose everything.

[Spktyr]

If the job banks don’t exist, as you claim, then why did the unions just propose that the UAW would allow the job banks to be scaled back?

[madison10]

Beats me. The jobs bank was a stupid idea in the first place. Relocating, or driving to another plant, for a short time should have been a requirement with the sort of pay the autoworkers are/were getting. No reason for them to be sitting on their butts.

[farlander]

I know people who write highly advanced software for less money and FAR less job security. Could they put bumpers on ? Heck yea. Could the bumper screwer guy write software ?

Well then. In free markets, people are paid by the size of the problem they solve. If you mess with that, the inefficiency sooner or later catches up with the business model.

[monkeycard]

Margaret Thatcher broke the unions in the UK. Who will be our Maggie?

[nascarnation]

The UAW was very cunning when they negotiated the jobs bank idea.
They took Roger Smith’s grand projections for the future and told him “of course your sales will continue to improve, so you’ll never need to pay us anything on this promise, and we can sell it to the rank and file in place of some other benefit”

[muawiyah]

You and others have been informed several times that the number $72 is the COST per workhour, not the PAY per workhour.

GM has monstrously high overhead ~ hundreds of thousands of retirees receive pensions and medical insurance form GM.

The guys working on the the don't earn the big bucks like they used to.

[EGPWS]

The United Auto Workers union called an emergency meeting...

In Washington D.C. by any chance?

Everyone else is having them there these days...