UAW Already Drawing Up Srike Criteria Ahead Of Contract Negotiations

As United Auto Workers negotiators bargain with Detroit’s Big Three automakers for a new four-year contract, the union will almost certainly face a critical decision: whether to call a strike against one of the Big Three, should they believe that action to be necessary.

It’s been 17 years since the last major strike at a U.S. automaker. The UAW struck two key General Motors plants in 1998 — Flint Metal Center and Delphi Flint East. The 54-day strike, the longest in three decades, crippled the Detroit automaker. It forced GM to idle nearly 180,000 employees and shutter 26 of 29 North American assembly plants. It idled more than a hundred auto supplier plants.

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TheSteve - 9/8/2015 12:20:20 PM

+2 Boost

Unions, in and of themselves, are not a bad idea. It's just that some Western-style unions, and the UAW specifically, are particularly bad implementations. They carry a sense of entitlement that is not conducive to the parent company's health, or in delivering enhanced value to consumers.

As an example of a union that can work well, I'm aware of an incident that happened in a Japanese auto manufacturing plant. Productivity went up noticeably. Senior managers were pleasantly surprised, and they reported this at the quarterly meetings. After a couple of months of heightened productivity, it went back down to the previous levels. Managers noticed! After a week, a union representative met with senior management and basically said (paraphrased by me), "Our people have worked hard to figure out how to enhance our productivity. We recently tested our theory, and we saw very good results, as I am sure you're aware. Our calculations indicate if we can sustain this new, higher level of productivity, then we can earn our company 4% more profit per vehicle! We request that you validate our calculations to see if they are accurate. If they are, we request a small portion of that profit, one third, as an incentive to our workers to sustain the higher level of productivity on an ongoing basis."

In this example, the Japanese union offered the parent company something in exchange for more income, and they demonstrated they could generate more value before they asked for more money. Essentially, they said, we will make you more profitable if we can share in that profit.

The UAW, on the other hand, always wants more for showing up on the job. More security, more benefits, more pay. They also want to share in the profits on their merit of showing up on the job. It's just a different way of thinking, and it produces different results.

MDarringer - 9/8/2015 7:26:42 PM

0 Boost

The UAW Gestapo bloodsuckers deserve be rounded up and turned over to ISIS. I wish unions a death sentence. They don't represent workers. They are merely a money grabbing arm for the Democrats.

7msynthetic - 9/10/2015 6:47:56 PM

+1 Boost

Ya so, that is what people do to prepare - duh