Union Auto Workers (UAW). Are they the problem?

[Vizzy]

Originally Posted By: Cutehumor


There are service jobs out there but folks don't want to do them.


That statement my friend is a "talking point" no political discussion is allowed here.

The problem is that most typical service jobs don't pay squat, not only can't you buy a cheap car with that wage you often times can't even pay the rent....if we can get the illegal aliens to go home maybe we could offer a reasonable wage for those jobs.

I don't blame some one for not wanting a job that they bust their butt at but can't even pay the rent with crumbs they make doing the work.

 

[Mr Nice]

Quote:
There are service jobs out there but folks don't want to do them.

What do you consider service type jobs ?
Many people feel they are too good to do that type of work.

 

[94 saturn sl1 2000 saturn sc2]

Well i currently work for the UAW although not in a automotivice setting, and this is my opinion. At my shop the union makes the wages slightly higher than they would be sor non union places. We make about 17 dollars an hour with ok health iusurance with 1000 dolalr deductables per year. The downside is alot of the old time workers are "lazy" and simply dont do their share. In terms of Autos I just bought a 2010 HHR and of all the GM cars i have owned this is the best built one. Very quiet. The issues at auto plants are actually the cheap suppliers they use for componants. Gm cars have always had suspension issues Power steerings shafts and what not that have been poor quality and continue to be because they selct suppliers totally by the cheapest one. If i got to take my car in every 20,000 miles to have a bad compnant replaced and it gets replaced with the same [censored] and in the next 20,000 miles it costs me a couple hundred bucks or more to replace it again, that can leave a bad taste in ones mouth. Also across the board, dealership service department confidence or lack of it can be a huge issue in whether one will by another car from a particular maker. In a nutshell Unions can have issues but as was said here most of the workers are fine , The crooks are in the leadership/ Regional representatives.

 

[oilboy123]

Originally Posted By: Kestas
Originally Posted By: eljefino
Well where did they engineer the Fusion?

I'll jump in and say that Detroit is moving its engineering offshore as well, as much as they can, and whenever it makes sense. I can only hope to hold on to my job until I retire 12 years from now.


I hope you make it Kestas, and I hope the trend starts going the opposite way.

I can hear the sucking sound.............. Seems that any job appears to be vulnerable to offshore job exporting............

 

[Kestas]

Manufacturing jobs will not return to the USA until our wages fall down to the world wage level - which I'm guessing is around $5K a year - to make us competitive in the new world market.

Whether we like it or not, we are headed in that direction. Whether it's from unemployment, replacement with younger cheaper workers, or extra unpaid hours tacked on by management. One bright spot is that the rest of the world is coming up in wages. But ours are still going down.

The sad part of this phenomenon is that people in manufacturing will suffer from what I call the "lag effect". This is where manufacturing wages will go down over time, yet other jobs (doctors, dentists, realtors, lawyers) will remain high until our bank accounts are depleted. Once these other professionals realize that they don't have any more clients with money, only then will they reduce their fees (and their wages).

I predicted this 15 years ago, and recently my dentist has complained about this phenomenon as well as the local hospitals that report they have fewer people with HMOs (or even jobs) showing up for treatment.

 

[Gary Allan]

Quote:
Whether we like it or not, we are headed in that direction. Whether it's from unemployment, replacement with younger cheaper workers, or extra unpaid hours tacked on by management. One bright spot is that the rest of the world is coming up in wages. But ours are still going down.


Here's the point that most of us missed all along the way. I'd often look at other nations as comically dysfunctional and say "what's their problem? Why do they find it so hard to achieve the level of prosperity that we have? Something is inherently defective with their system/education/whatever." ..when in fact it was 100% due to us commanding all that there was to the furthest we could.

Hence for any elevation to occur, we HAVE to be the ones giving something up. You'll watch the entire guild of "aligned western or westernized nations" decline as the 3rd world prospers.

At one point we commanded 95% of all the developed resources. That was simply because we could pay for them and others could not.

Funny, it didn't feel like I was part of that whole deal to the amount that one would reason from an outside view.

 

[mechanicx]

Why don't CEOs, upper management and business owners become cost competitive with developing nations too along with physicians, dentists etc? I see a world-wide 2-tier system developing of mostly poor and a small percentage of the very rich.

I don't really think Western nations were gobbling up all the resources or opressing the rest of the world. Many poor countries had and still have resources that they just didn't develop. Simply, western nations inventd and developed most all technologies that are being used today. We just voluntarily gave it away to other countries to produce it. I agree that there are not enough resources for everyone to live at a higher standard, but these other countries good produce for their own market. They don't need to be producing for our market too. At the rate the US is going we are voluntarily falling below the average and in debt.

 

[tig1]

I retired from a machine shop and we were with the IAM and glad for it. We had a far better package than non union shops but the non union shops charged almost the same shop rate as our union shop.

 

[Vizzy]

Gary,

while it is true that the US and other western nations use a majority of natural resources it is also true that the unique culture, history, and yes racial aspects of Western European society made us (Western Europe and the US) what we are today as a leader in many things... This is the anglo saxon phenomenon. It ain't politically correct to detail it, but there it is.

I say this not to be cruel but honest...you can educate, train, and give all kinds of assistance to folks in other cultures and nations but somehow they can never replicate our societies in terms of development as we know it, where things tend to have a certain balance to them that really give us a very pleasant life to live for the most part, sure we have problems but if you have the desire to improve yourself and live a good life you can...you just can't find that anywhere else. Frankly I don't want to lose it and neither do most Western Europeans.

All I see us doing is sacrificing our culture, heritage, and place in the world for folks that will likely use what we give them against us in the end not only will they destroy themselves but all traces of Western European culture and heritage.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
It's a joke with car prices now a days. When new economy cars are pushing the $20k mark with features, it's pretty bad.


There are still many stripper cars for less than $15k, and since cars last so much longer nowadays, why do you have to buy new every several years?

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Kestas
Manufacturing jobs will not return to the USA until our wages fall down to the world wage level - which I'm guessing is around $5K a year - to make us competitive in the new world market.

Whether we like it or not, we are headed in that direction. Whether it's from unemployment, replacement with younger cheaper workers, or extra unpaid hours tacked on by management. One bright spot is that the rest of the world is coming up in wages. But ours are still going down.

The sad part of this phenomenon is that people in manufacturing will suffer from what I call the "lag effect". This is where manufacturing wages will go down over time, yet other jobs (doctors, dentists, realtors, lawyers) will remain high until our bank accounts are depleted. Once these other professionals realize that they don't have any more clients with money, only then will they reduce their fees (and their wages).

I predicted this 15 years ago, and recently my dentist has complained about this phenomenon as well as the local hospitals that report they have fewer people with HMOs (or even jobs) showing up for treatment.


Well said. This is actually why the last leaders wanted to devalue the US dollar so bad, because that's the cheapest way to get around high labor cost, high fixed legacy cost, and default on foreign loan.

More than likely the foreign labor cost will go up over time to something like 20k (after inflation/devaluation) before it stopped. We've seen some of the outsourcing in certain IT field to come back to the US as the foreign cost being not low enough to justify the risk and productivity loss (communication, time zone, etc).

Hopefully living expense in life don't go up demanding more than what 3rd world nations cost by too much. If everyone has to pay 500-700k for a house like we do in the valley, we'll be screwed.

 

[Gary Allan]

Originally Posted By: Vizzy
Gary,

while it is true that the US and other western nations use a majority of natural resources it is also true that the unique culture, history, and yes racial aspects of Western European society made us (Western Europe and the US) what we are today as a leader in many things... This is the anglo saxon phenomenon. It ain't politically correct to detail it, but there it is.

I say this not to be cruel but honest...you can educate, train, and give all kinds of assistance to folks in other cultures and nations but somehow they can never replicate our societies in terms of development as we know it, where things tend to have a certain balance to them that really give us a very pleasant life to live for the most part, sure we have problems but if you have the desire to improve yourself and live a good life you can...you just can't find that anywhere else. Frankly I don't want to lose it and neither do most Western Europeans.

All I see us doing is sacrificing our culture, heritage, and place in the world for folks that will likely use what we give them against us in the end not only will they destroy themselves but all traces of Western European culture and heritage.



Well, there's a big yes and no to that whole thing. Even with absolutely nothing ..shall we say ..sinister, our incredible wealth with being the only intact industrial nation post WWII had us soaking up global revenue. We were owed and that made the U$D king. We contained this wealth internally with fair trade laws and metered global development along our lines of strategic interest. If you weren't a strategic asset or threat ...well you just weren't on any priority list of tinkering with one way or the other.

Again, forget all the neo-colonialism or neo-Imperialism stuff. Just having all that capital to pay for the stuff was good enough to have the divisions as they stand.

Let me put it this way. If 5X the global resources were available ... I think things would be almost exactly the same. 5X the consumption would be focused here.

 

[mechanicx]

That's kind of interesting. Now other countries are looking out after their interests a lot more than we did even in the post WWII boom. Afterall we did help rebuild Germany and Japan, got Japan out of China, defended S. Korea. Now, other countries are looking after their best interests and supplying the production for our consumer market while they maintain there own. The US seems to be voluntarily and drastically giving up its economy. It's kind of telling when they have auto unions and protect their markets and take shares of our market and are non-Union here.

 

[glen242]

I was in middle/upper plant management for 35 years. My last position was production manager/labor relations.

My union employees were not over paid, at least the ones who believed a fair days work for a fair days pay.

98-99% of the union employees, in the three different plants I was involved in, would have made the cut at any non-union plant.

My problems came from the 1-2% who, with their attitude/work ethic, should never have been hired or kept their job. Having massive documentation on their misbehavior, subjecting them to repeated disciplinary action, when the time came for me to terminate them, the union always choose to go to arbitration, rather then agree to let me terminate them. In all cases that I was involved in, the arbitrator never let me terminate an employee. They always said reinstate, BUT if he ever does anything bad again, I will review the case. This even for an employee who has done the same thing, documented and disciplined for, many times in the past. One drunkin bum, who I terminated for not showing up for work, did not show up for work on his first day of reinstatement by the arbitrator. Yet the union went to the arbitrator and asked he not be terminated. That particular arbitrator grew a set and I was allowed to terminate him.

Work rules... I had employees, all in the same union, but, if a machine broke down, I could not assign the idle employees to othe union jobs. They got to go to the lunch room and sit on their butts.
Early in my career, I saw one of my new machine operators in trouble. I went over to help him out. He said "Don't touch MY machine". I told him it was "The Company's Machine and I would do what I could to help the situation". He filed a grievance, we had a hearing, and the Plant General Manager agreed with the union. So it is not always the union's fault but sometimes it is weak willed management. BTW, there was nothing in the contract that said I could not TOUCH the machine and help out in an emergency.

My perception of unions is, most employees do not need it, only the 1-2% of the slackers do. And these are the people that the union spends their time and resources representing!

I have other stories, but they are for another time.

 

[hertzer]

Originally Posted By: glen242


My perception of unions is, most employees do not need it, only the 1-2% of the slackers do. And these are the people that the union spends their time and resources representing!

I have other stories, but they are for another time.


You mean your perception of the UAW is what you've experienced. I would have to agree. But don't paint with such a wide brush by your experience with auto unions. Trade unions are nothing like that. I am an IBEW member, and if you don't perform on the job, you won't stay employed very long.

 

[M1Accord]

Union can be a good thing because employers would turn us all into slave without the protection. However, I don't buy into the Beg 3 or traitor theory. I buy cars made in the U.S. and not North America, which could be Canada or Mexico. I don't care whether the profit goes oversea or stay here with the gringo fat cats. As long as the jobs are here, that is all it should mater. Rich CEOs and those profit from auto sale don't necessary spend their money in the state; therefore the notion that profit must stay here is very silly. It's the jobs that must stay here.

So my next car will be either a Honda built in the U.S. or a used American SUV or truck built in the U.S.

 

[mechanicx]

That's a very reasonable take but the thing is a GM or Ford supports up to 3 times as many jobs as certain other brands inside and outside the auto industry. It's very possible for a Canada or Mexico assembled Ford or GM to actually supports more jobs than an US import transplant with all the design engineering and suppliers. Also there are many domestics that are made in the US. Although, at the rate things are going and if the domestics keep outsourcing it won't make much difference.

 

[Gary Allan]

Quote:
That's kind of interesting. Now other countries are looking out after their interests a lot more than we did even in the post WWII boom. Afterall we did help rebuild Germany and Japan, got Japan out of China, defended S. Korea.


Oh, really? I suppose you're thinking of stuff like The Marshall Plan and whatnot? Sure, a whole lot of good occurred with the good old USA providing vitally needed material support for rebuilding a world literally war torn and destroyed.

How about this spin on it? What were you going to do with a 100% intact industrial and agricultural base that was running @ 1000% productivity from pre-war capacity? Bring your heroes home to a depression? After you went to all the trouble to blow your future competition to pieces, and had an entire FOR PROFIT sector just itching to continue on in DaddyWarBucks manner with making money hand over fist, what else would you do?

It all depends on how you write the history. Now don't confuse that with me thinking that someone else should have had the right to make their version more valid by being the victor

 

[mechanicx]

I don't even know how to respond to that. Germany especially and Japan were industrialized at the time and attacked all those other countries, and were treated after defeat a lot better than they treated anyone. And somehow the US was the bad guy just because we had are own idustries and develop many products and technologies?

 

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted By: mechanicx
I don't even know how to respond to that. Germany especially and Japan were industrialized at the time and attacked all those other countries, and were treated after defeat a lot better than they treated anyone. And somehow the US was the bad guy just because we had are own idustries and develop many products and technologies?


According to some of the angry Canucks (and others) on here, YES we ARE the ONLY "bad guys", and should now just let ALL of the foreign entities take over our economy (trade-wise) because it is simply "their time".

I, BTW, REFUSE to just 'go along' with the above attitudes, as the 'free trade, global economists' would have U.S. do.