From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
The Big Three's real union problem
If there is hope for the Big Three and for the UAW, it rests in unionizing the foreign automakers' U.S. plants.
By Jonathan Cutler

December 6, 2008

The Big Three are a mess, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Washington lawmakers pondering the bailout for Detroit have been grilling executives of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler about their role in the crisis. But sitting by their side Thursday on Capitol Hill was Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Auto Workers.

Even if a deal for a $15-billion to $17-billion preliminary bailout comes together this weekend to keep carmakers afloat into 2009, they will continue to be dogged by their most significant competitive disadvantage: a high-priced, unionized workforce. After all, hasn't it always been the central goal of labor unions to maximize the per capita wage bill -- including medical and retirement benefits -- paid out to its membership? Maybe the UAW is simply too good at what it does.

It seemed clear from the hearings that to OK any larger bailout plan, Congress was going to insist on cutting labor costs. Already, Gettelfinger has coughed up concessions on job security protections and delayed payment to a retiree healthcare trust and is talking about modifying contracts.

And yet there is nothing inherently unsustainable about employing a high-priced, unionized workforce. The crisis of Detroit's wage bill is entirely relative. Specifically, their labor costs far exceed the low-cost, nonunion American workforce at the U.S.-based, foreign-owned plants of competitors Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru.

If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union's utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn't it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized?

As is now clear, when the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat.

Perhaps these accusations seem overly harsh. After all, aren't most of the transplants located in the right-to-work states of the Deep South? Some are, but this hardly explains why the UAW failed to organize the first Honda transplant, located not in Alabama but right in Ohio, the heart of the industrial Midwest.

Is transplant management the difference then? According to the prevailing wisdom, Japanese auto companies neither trust nor understand the American notion of labor unionism. Ah, but there's the rub. The very companies that operate as nonunion transplants in the United States have always confronted a unionized workforce at home, organized by the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation.

The UAW simply never established any sort of alliance with the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation. And yet the UAW leadership knew plenty about Japan and the Japanese labor movement. The leader of the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation was Ichiro Shioji. As David Halberstam noted in his 1986 book, "The Reckoning," Shioji spent a year at Harvard in 1960 and then spent a summer at the UAW headquarters in Detroit, befriending all the major UAW leaders, including Walter Reuther, Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser. Shioji was no stranger to the UAW.

Nor were the UAW leaders unfamiliar with Japan. In 1980, for example, UAW President Fraser (fresh off helping Chrysler secure its 1979 bailout) spent a week there talking with major Japanese car companies about building plants in the United States. Just before embarking on his trip, Fraser told a UAW convention that he would demand "that foreign companies that benefit from our markets contribute to them by building products here." In a gesture of bravado that today seems almost suicidal, Fraser declared that "the U.S. market needs the discipline of foreign competition."

In Japan, when companies were contemplating overseas transplants in the early '80s, Shioji held a de facto right to approve or disapprove the plans. He resisted efforts by Nissan to establish transplants in Britain, for instance, and the Financial Times reported how he could scuttle any deal: "Nissan probably could not go ahead in Britain without Shioji's backing [because] the union would have to approve the transfer to the U.K. of key production staff."

In the end, though, Shioji pushed for establishing Japanese transplants in the United States. It is a question for students of Japanese labor to explain why Shioji refused to protect his own union members from the threat of nonunion labor in the United States. But for students of American labor, the urgent question is whether the UAW even once asked its good friend Shioji to use his leverage in solidarity with American workers.

It is not too late to save the Big Three. But the solution is not to tear down the historic and heroic gains won by prior generations of UAW workers. If there is hope long term -- for the unionized Big Three companies and for the UAW -- it rests in dealing with the unfinished business of the 1980s: unionizing the unorganized transplants.

Jonathan Cutler is associate professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. He is the author of "Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism."

From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
The Big Three's real union problem
If there is hope for the Big Three and for the UAW, it rests in unionizing the foreign automakers' U.S. plants.
By Jonathan Cutler

UAW.....your free ride is over, get in the back seat and pay the cabbie.

To the Japanese automobile manufacturers, unions are the plague. And the United Auto Workers (UAW) admit to having a tough time getting new union members when they visit Japanese manufacturers' plants (called 'transplants') in the U.S. "People just aren’t interested," said one union organizer.


The Japanese auto makers in the U.S. seem to be winning their battle with the UAW because the people they employ seem convinced that the benefits are good and that the union couldn't do any better. Moreover, these auto makers tend to build plants in the U.S. in areas that have a low average wage for laborers.
Worse, conditions are better in transplants in some areas. An example of a happy plant of workers is in the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. The workers are now being paid more and getting better bonuses than UAW workers average at domestic plants.

Yet the UAW continues to try. It attempted to organize the workers at the Subaru plant in Lafayette at least three times. The result? Nada, nothing. The plant will be producing Camrys (pictured) in a joint venture with Toyota in April.

Our take? The strength of the UAW has ebbed substantially. In 1979 the union had a membership of 1.5 million. By 2005 it had plunged to 600,000. Unless the transplants do something real stupid like slashing wages in half or eliminating medical benefits, we see union membership continue to dwindle.

The unions are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem. Unionizing more industry in the US would lead to more outsourcing and even greater job losses. Furthermore, union shops have very little production flexibility, as evident in Detroit. Honda of America on the other hand has the flexibility of shifting production to meet customers' demands.

The unions are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem. Unionizing more industry in the US would lead to more outsourcing and even greater job losses. Furthermore, union shops have very little production flexibility, as evident in Detroit. Honda of America on the other hand has the flexibility of shifting production to meet customers' demands.

I really can't understand how anyone could possibly blame unions for the outsourcing of jobs to third world slave states.
The blame lies with the greed of the corporate elites.

Some union working person, making a decent living with the security of knowing they have healthcare when needed and a pension at the end of their working life cannot possibly be the source of the problem.

Focus your sights on the jerks making $40 million a year before you complain about working people.

What does your interpretation of flexible include?

The fastest growing business segments right now are the "temp" agencies.
Just another way to have disposable employees available.
Very flexible for the company but no security or future for the employees.

What does your interpretation of flexible include?

Unions have a contract that cannot be changed.

Unions have a contract that cannot be changed.

Not true....they can be re-negotiated

From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
The Big Three's real union problem
If there is hope for the Big Three and for the UAW, it rests in unionizing the foreign automakers' U.S. plants.
By Jonathan Cutler

I'd like to give this Cutler fellow a big kick in his......

His attitude and opinion is that rather than the UA F-ing W realizing that they are no longer the only kid on the block, and they are part of a competitive market, they should hijack the free market system and, by unionizing their competition, force everybody else in the country to continue to support them and the ridiculously posh wage and benefit structure they have managed to extort from all of us over the past years via the Big 3.

Don't bail them out at my expense please. Let them reap what they have sown. It may cause additional chaos in our already bad economy....but I am sure the foreign automakers will be happy to ramp up and supply us with more economical cars produced by non-union workers earning a more honest wage.

Like the rest of us in this country who buy automobiles....

UAW.....your free ride is over, get in the back seat and pay the cabbie.

Reality check time here. American executives across the board in virtually every business make vastly more(100X or more) than the average worker. This is a poor business model. it robs the workers and the share holders. Remember one thing. The guys making the product should be well compensated because... well they make the damn stuff you are trying to market. poorly paid people tend to not perform well at their job

Reality check time here. American executives across the board in virtually every business make vastly more(100X or more) than the average worker. This is a poor business model. it robs the workers and the share holders. Remember one thing. The guys making the product should be well compensated because... well they make the damn stuff you are trying to market. poorly paid people tend to not perform well at their job

Well stated. Include UK executives as well - as far as I'm concerned these T***'s are nothing but parasites.

A little history reading on Henry Ford during a study I did for school, revealed that offering double normal wage reduced costs for the business, via a reduction in staff turnover & accidents, and resulted in acquisition of the best available workforce from across the country, along with the invention of corporate family welfare and schooling.

If modern business practice were to follow this logical cost reduction method, I see no reason for the existence of unions whatsoever.

was it union fault, no, i didn´t think so