Word: uaw
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when we're talking about auto giants GM and Chrysler, both of which imploded after years of complicity and ineptitude by GM management and the United Auto Workers (UAW), it's more like disintegration. The UAW organized both GM and Chrysler in early 1937 - Henry Ford famously held out four more years. For decades, particularly under the leadership of Walter Reuther, who headed the union from 1946 until his death in 1970, it was able to win concessions from the automakers, bringing its members into the middle class. As long as demand for autos grew in the post...
...therein lies the problem. For years the UAW and the Big Three - now dwindled to the Detroit Three - operated an unholy alliance. Management would pile on wage hikes and perks, and in return (wink, wink) the union would keep the peace, i.e., rule out strikes, even though both sides must have realized that the amount being paid to workers was unsustainable, particularly if the industry hit any downdrafts - which happened with increasing frequency starting with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
That's harshly arbitrary, as is the fact that UAW jobs have been saved, at least for now, thanks to $60 billion of government money flowing into GM and Chrysler. Meanwhile, other companies have been allowed to croak. I can see how on macroeconomic grounds, it makes sense. Letting GM and Chrysler go under would have devastated the industrial Midwest and deprived millions of retirees of their postemployment health care. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Duane Zuckschwerdt, UAW Region 1C director and a member of the union's top executive board, readily acknowledges that Flint is often held up as a symbol of crippling labor-management strife, but he sees the Volt investment as a significant milestone for the city. "I know you go just 50 miles west of here and they think the town is dead," Zuckschwerdt says. "But it's not. GM knows they have a very talented workforce here," he says...
...Most crucially, the entire region has to realize that defining itself solely by the misperceived needs of a single industry has left all of southeastern Michigan dazed and bleeding. And yet the conditions for resetting that economic model couldn't be more favorable. The collapse of the UAW's prohibitive wage scale, coupled with the vast unemployment, is turning what was once the nation's most expensive labor market into one of the cheapest. For the first time since Henry Ford offered $5 a day to the men who assembled the Model T back in 1914, Detroit is open...