From 2005:
Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.
“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”
Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.
Read it all and note especially this section:
By making it so expensive to keep paying idled workers, the UAW thought Detroit automakers would avoid layoffs. By discouraging layoffs, the union thought it could prevent outsourcing.
That strategy has worked but at the expense of the domestic auto industry’s long-term viability
.
Sign me up!
WOW! I am in the wrong line of work.
I will never again buy from Ford, GM, or Chrysler!
As a non-auto worker Michigan resident, it’s easy to dump on the UAW and the car companies. I get it. But before you say you will never again buy from Ford, GM or Chrysler please consider this:
If you don’t buy from them, you buy from a foreign car maker, which sends more of our money overseas.
The union workers (and I’m not a union member either) have helped improve the free market living standard of union and non-union members alike.
You can blame the UAW, but it takes two sides to approve a contract. So while the government hands $125 billion and more to thieves who set up a Ponzi scheme worked through a bank pigeon drop remember the car companies are asking for a loan, not a hand out.
After 9/11, it was the car companies who, at great financial loss, offered buyer incentives that lured millions to show rooms to purchase car at under cost to help get our economy going again.
My wife and I only buy American, it’s our way of helping our neighbors, our State and our country.
So dig in your heels, let the companies go broke, send hundreds of thousands of workers to the streets and then in a dozen years wonder why the only car you can buy has a Japanese, Korean or European name plate. And trust me, the prices will skyrocket.
Want someone to blame, blame a Congress and government that forced car companies to build vehicles no one wanted, or sold metal coffins with good gas mileage (my old Chevette comes to mind) so they could balance the mileage requirements of the big cars that the rest of us really wanted to drive.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but refusing to buy a pretty good product, made by our neighbors in our country seems a little counter-intuitive.
It’s a free country, so you can buy what you want, but when you lose the Big Three, plan on buying some pretty awful vehicles, the ones that will be mandated by the government, in the future.
If we’re willing to hand a bunch of crooks from AIG the keys to the treasury, can’t we float a loan to the folks who helped us win World War II and were patriotic enough to help get the country back on its feet after Sept. 11, 2001.
Just sayin’
I wouldn’t mind lending the money if all union contracts were declared open for re-negotiation and there was some HARD negotiation. And there was transparency all along the way. But handing over money, like we did with the banks, with NO oversight is foolish beyond measure. For example, Toyota manufacturing in this country is much less costly than Detroit. Buying a “foreign” car doesn’t necessarily mean buying from an overseas factory – often they are made right in the U.S. at much less cost.
This is just the tip of the featherbedding iceberg, believe me. I could go on for paragraphs about the nonsense I personally witnessed at the assembly plant I worked at.
We had this sort of thing in New Zealand — it nearly killed our freezing works, shut down our railways, and crippled the civil service.
In the end it collapsed. We do still have freezing works — but far fewer of them, we still have a railways but instead of 20,000 employees it has 4,000 (that implies there were 16,000 crossword workers — 4 for every person who has really working), and the public service is also much leaner.
There is light at the end of the tunnel in other words, but the tradegy is that this way of doing it will mean a lot of people get hurt, who if they had been laid off in good times would have readily found other jobs.
#4 Jim, don’t forget GM own Opel, and they got paid reparations for the destruction of the German Opel plants by American and British bombing.
We are facing the same problems here in Australia, our car industry is largely still unable to compete on a level plating field with imports. Strangely however, we build Mitsubishi engines which are exported, and put in the cars we buy back. Our local GM factory is really only an assembler of parts imported from elsewhere, the engines are built in Germany.
The world car is here, and the conglomerates will assemble the cars in the cheapest location they can find. Give them a subsidy, and they may stay a little longer but don’t count on it. Our PM has just offered 6.5b over five years, most of which will probably end up off shore.
Jon R
p.s. Correction Rudd’s subsidy is 6.2bil. Which translates as $31,000 tax payer dollars for each job in the car industry in Australia. Not sure how long we can keep that up.
Jon R
Let me get this straight — the gentleman featured who probably has no more than a high school diploma was earning more than many people with college degrees and now he’s earning that money doing nothing?
And this company wants a bailout? Right.
If you’ve never seen the Boulting Brothers classic film ‘I’m alright Jack’ (1959 – starring Peter Sellers and just about every other British comedy actor of the period), you ought to. The scene with the card-playing workers behind the packing cases could virtually represent the crossword-players of today’s America. I have told my children that if they want to understand the Britain in which their parents grew up, they should watch that film. I’d always assumed the USA didn’t have the problems of pre-Thatcher Britain, but it seems I was wrong.
And btw, when they’d finished lampooning British industry the Boulting brothers moved on to the Church of England in ‘Heavens Above’ (1963). Also essential viewing.
When my wife and I buy a car, we first check out Consumer Reports and see what vehicle is highest rated at our price point. None of the Big Three’s cars have been at or near the top rated in years.
Yes, GM, Ford and Chrysler have been making cars nobody wants. But a major part of that has been the lack of quality of US cars. If I can buy a Hyundai made in Alabama that beats out a Chevy in every category, including price, I’m buying the Hyundai.
If the auto workers had made better cars, I’d be more sympathetic to their ‘plight’. If the automakers had designed and made better cars, I’d be more sympathetic to their plight. As it is, I don’t want them to have any of my money.
At the risk of sounding like Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no bankruptcy courts? Have chapter seven and chapter eleven been abolished?”
One final note, y’all do realize that the article is from 2005?
We had some crossword puzzlers in this area for awhile – the plant where they did their puzzling shut down early last year and the owners are now wrangling with the city about demolishing the building. The city wants to keep it in the hope of filling it again, with something. It has been a very sad situation all around.
In the final analysis, we’ve made this bed ourselves, and now we get to lie in it. The “puzzle-wlrker” is a symptom, not a root cause. A $73-78 per hour wage (including fringes) is ridiculous, but we need to remember, it took two to negotiate that. The unions have dug their own grave, but the negotiating management didn’t have the nerve to look the unions in the eye and say what they should have: “We have thousands of jobs at $20 an hour; we have none at $22.” Oh, wait, Iacocca did say something very similar to that, and the unions took about 24 hours to accept his generous offer!!
In the final analysis, if we want to see who put America in it’s current sad situation – – let’s go find a mirror.
Unions are nothing more than legally sanctioned organized extortion rackets. With an Obama administration and the Democrats in control of both houses, look for the emboldened unions to get even more aggressive and extend their tenticles into more and more workplaces.
#15,
Part of it is institutional inertia from the 1950’s, when the Big 3 was the only game in town and they could happily pass the costs of these generous CBA’s on to their customers. An assembly-line worker making a six-figure salary is preposterous. Pouring $25B of taxpayer money into that business model will not work.
Do assembly line workers make six-figure salaries? frankly, I think assembly line workers do more to earn their salaries than many of the CEOs who have successfully tanked their companies in recent months.
Yes, Sherri, they do make six figures. Believe me. I personally saw a W-2 of an assembly line worker who had one year of college and made 94K. This was in 1987, over 20 years ago! His benefits and vacation days were absolutely unbelievable too. This industry has way overcompensated its employees for a long, long time, and now it has caught up with them.
[blockquote]Unions are nothing more than legally sanctioned organized extortion rackets. [/blockquote]
Not necessarily, #16. I’ve worked with IBEW electricians for years, and have found them to be generally very, very good at what they do and cost-effective when compared to their non-union counterparts when one considers things like correction of mistakes, serious “blue flash” incidents and the need for close engineering supervision. I attribute that to the fact the contractors they work for are not monopoly providers of electrical installation…they have to compete with other union and non-union contractors, so they have to be at the top of their game to command their wages.
The same isn’t true for “in-house” unions like the UAW. If a consumer wants a Corvette, he can only get that from GM. If he wants a switch hooked up to a light, he can get that from any number of suppliers. It’s only this market segmentation that has kept the UAW afloat as long as it has.
Alli B, I would suggest that that was not the norm.
The auto plant in this area offered the best paid jobs in the area, but the only people in six figures were in management.
I was privy to this information because of my position in the legal field. Actually this fellow was an electrician/supervisor at the GM plant in Doraville, Georgia. I’m not sure if that qualifies as management. He did work a good bit of overtime, but remember, this was 1987. Imagine what his pay would be now. I was aghast at what he made considering his education. UAW is almost completely responsible for this mess.
Not management, perhaps, but not a line worker either. Even in the old, unionized textile mills of the South an employee in such a capacity would have made substantially more than a line worker would.
We should not forget, the unions (and specifically in this case, the UAW) made their “demands.” And it has been obvious to a lot of us laborers in industry that their demands were ridiculously exorbitant, for a long time.
However, management bears an equal responsibility. Business was so good, cars were selling so well, the after-market parts industry was so lucrative, that management could not bring themselves to say “NO!”
I will never forget sitting on the union side of the bargaining table for a local union in an abrasives manufacturing plant in Indiana in the late 1960’s. We asked for COLA. It seemed reasonable enough to us. The Director of Human Resources, the negotiator for the company, quietly said, “Gentlemen, that is a “close-the-plant issue.” We asked for a clarification, and he said, ” I will order this plant closed before we give you COLA. If you want your jobs, forget it – -right now, and forever.”
We gave up our demand for COLA on the following go-around. We realized he meant it, and he could make it stick. Forty years later, I remember him, his determination to defend the profit of his company, and I remember him with admiration and respect.
[blockquote]UAW is almost completely responsible for this mess. [/blockquote]
To be fair, management signed the same contracts as the UAW. Management’s mistake was signing on to commitments that were essentially perpetual such as the pension and retiree healthcare items. I made six figures when I worked at GM (as a contract engineer), but my costs were purely hourly: The minute I walked out the door, I didn’t cost GM a penny. That’s not the case with UAW members, and GM was foolish to ever agree to such a thing.
It’s 11 now, or 7 later. And not dice.