Struck Down

I've read a few articles about the General Motors/UAW strike, (I won't link any; just Google it and you'll get thousands of articles), and when you burn away the anti-corporate rhetoric predominant in the liberal press, it appears the UAW took it in the ass and then said, "Thank you, sir! May I have another?" Oh, they're trying to claim victory, but it's a transparent sop to their membership; the Golden Goose was about to become tomorrow night's dinner, and Gettelfinger damned well knew it.

The biggest single concession in terms of the future of American auto manufacturing seems to have been the two-tier wage rate concession in non-manufacturing jobs. That opens up the possibility for GM, (as well as Ford and Chrysler, when they re-negotiate their own contracts), to start herding some of the over-paid mouth-breathers away from the slop trough. If they can keep the $50/hour wrench-turner jobs to a smaller percentage of the overall work force and pay the tool cage boy what he should be paid, perhaps they'll get to do some broken field running against the Japanese.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that the execs can't become greedy when things start to improve. If they immediately soak up any jump in the margins as their "just due," it'll all have been for naught. And executives are very often just as stupid, greedy and short-sighted as union managers.

Sometimes capitalism just sucks.