Word: uaw
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tuesday, Rickie Doty, president of the UAW Local 974 here, sat in his office and carefully considered the future. Just one day earlier, Caterpillar Inc., his employer of 35 years and one of the world's leading purveyors of construction equipment, announced it would shed some 20,000 jobs - nearly one-fifth of its global workforce. The announcement just made things official: the bulk of that astonishing figure is already off the Peoria company's books, including some 2,500 management-level personnel who accepted buyouts in recent weeks and 8,000 people who worked on contract or through agencies...
...Detroit may still collapse. This will be determined by the federal government. The government can keep the industry on life support even if GM (GM) and Chrysler do not get cooperation from the UAW and creditors. If the two firms are thrown into bankruptcy, the number of people then out of work would conservatively be measured in hundreds of thousands. (See pictures of Detroit...
...before Dixie gets too smug, it should acknowledge a debt it owes Detroit, or rather Detroit's labor union, the United Autoworkers (UAW). The UAW has made the Big Three's labor force one of the world's best paid and protected - clout that is now a focus of what's wrong with Detroit. Still, the foreign automakers are in America in large part because, as their more fuel-efficient cars became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s and '90s, the UAW lobbied to get them to build production plants here...
...firms flocked to the South to avoid Detroit's high-cost culture. But while southern auto employees extol the union-free, right-to-work rules of their states, the truth is that they might still be earning the basement-level wages of a Mississippi textile worker today if the UAW hadn't leaned on the likes of Mercedes in Washington. "Mercedes wanted a much lower pay scale when it arrived here," says Cashman, who notes that veteran southern autoworkers now earn "only fractionally less" than the average $27 an hour for Detroit workers (and often end up with more, thanks...
...same time, southern workers have taught the UAW an important lesson about helping to keep that industry viable. The foreign companies enjoy not only the South's lower legacy costs but a more flexible production culture. Unlike the Big Three, the southern car plants are far more agile when it comes to accommodating shifting market demand; and that's due largely to employees' willingness to exact fewer of the production rules UAW contracts are notorious...