Car Insurance | So Cons, What You Are Saying Is That Union Auto ...
Reducing the American worker to poverty will NOT help our economy. Henry Ford was smart enough to realize that his company would fail if his workers were too poor to buy his cars. If anything we need to be cutting executive pay and raising wages for workers in non-unionized industries. When working class people get paid, 100% of that money gets spent and put back into the local economy. Most Toyotas and Hondas sold in the US are made in the US. The employees do not have government health care. They are happy with where they work. As long as a company complies with federal regulations, it is free to operate. If you want your business to have different standards, that is up to you. Don’t force those standards onto other companies which are successful and have happy employees. None of my friends who work at Honda live in poverty and they are all happy with their jobs. There union haters are out there to be sure. But the roughly 180,000 active union workers (or at least they were active until the mortgage meltdown) cannot possibly be the cause of the crisis in the automobile industry. According to a UAW web site I visited, labor costs, direct and indirect, represent less than nine percent of the average selling price of a domestically produced car, or about $2,400 versus an average selling price of something more than $28,000. But there are another 540,000 retirees and dependent spouses who depend on the automakers for their pensions and part of their health care costs. Those costs are included in the “overhead” that make the cost of the cars we make too expensive. Our automakers spend a fortune designing, engineering, marketing and transporting their cars to dealer showrooms. The payments to union workers and their retirees and dependent spouses were arrived at through collective bargaining, not through threats and intimidation. The problem is not the unions, nor is it executive compensation. The latter is a drop in the bucket in the overall cost structure of the automakers. The big problem is the line-up of vehicles our “Big 3” produce and sell. When gas was fairly cheap, the companies reintroduced the muscle cars and flooded the market with gas guzzling SUVs and trucks. They were a big hit until gas prices shot up and people stopped buying them. Now even those who would like to buy them can’t get loans to finance them. Ultimately, we must look to the managements that decided what kinds of vehicles to build, not to the labor that built them. Any agreement that would substantially cut union wages and the benefits paid to retirees and dependent spouses would be unworkable. Active workers would lose their homes and the others would need to go on welfare. Workers who have just lost their homes do not make good cars – or “good” anything else. BTW, it is NOT conservatives, of which I am one, who are pointing fingers and saying the unions should “take one for the team.” I’m not saying that at all. Nor am I even asking why congress, our official “regulators,” who should be hanged in public squares, are so late in addressing this problem. Why didn’t they look ahead and increase CAFÉ standards many years ago? I actually don’t think the workers are as much to blame as the greedy and self-important union bosses who collect an even fatter wage for lording it over the rank and file (read peons). But it is clear that our auto industries cannot compete with foreign run businesses even in our own country. It appears to me that the flaw originates from sources managerial as well as labor. But, ‘twould appear the only way to break free from the domination of the UAW is to starve it to death, hope the actual peons can keep their heads down til the fur quits flying, and will rise to work again in a leaner, meaner, and more competitive business.
