Democratic Talk Radio Blog

Dave Zweifel’s Plain Talk: Real culprits are ignored in attacks on auto workers

by Dave Zweifel

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/315311

I’m not 100 percent sold on this $25 million lifeline that General Motors wants from the federal government, but listening to some of these self-important commentators attack it as being a sop to the United Auto Workers is enough to make one sick.

Indeed, some are portraying the UAW as the real villain of the American auto industry’s enormous financial problems — not the corporate leaders who were paid handsomely to be visionaries for their stockholders but were so blinded by big car profits that they couldn’t see the sea change that was headed their way.

Many of these anti-union pontificators don’t have a problem with pumping tens of billions into those banking conglomerates like Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase where millionaire executives can pad their own accounts or throw multimillion-dollar “retreats” for the company bigshots like insurance giant AIG did with money from its first U.S. Treasury bailout. Bailing THESE guys out is necessary to save the American economy, they say, but not the men and women who have toiled 40 hours a week on the assembly line floor so they can pay their mortgages and with any luck send their kids to college.

These columnists and bloggers lump unions with corporate America as “special interests,” and since the UAW pumped lots of money into Barack Obama’s campaign this fall, they claim that’s why he and Democrats in Congress are ready to bail out GM.

True, unions do get deeply involved in elections, just like their management counterparts do. But, their “special interests” happen to be the working people who through the years have typically received the short end of the stick while corporations like Boeing, Xerox, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric and other corporate special interests have made their contributions and been treated to corporate welfare by their friends in government.

It’s also true that UAW members at GM, Ford and Chrysler are paid more than are the workers at the foreign-owned American auto plants, but that’s not to say the union hasn’t made considerable concessions in an effort to help right the ship, including taking over health insurance and agreeing to wage concessions that will eventually close that disparity.

Some of these union critics would rather have the auto companies go bankrupt so that they can, with a bankruptcy court’s blessing, tear up the union contracts and eliminate other workers’ safeguards. Some won’t be happy until auto workers earn Wal-Mart-like wages. Perhaps, then they, too, can qualify for free health care that the taxpayers provide those who fall below the poverty line. That would really move America forward.

If we decide we need to provide taxpayer loans to the auto companies, we need to do it very carefully and with safeguards that will not only make those corporations stronger, but give taxpayers a good chance of getting their money back in the end.

And if it helps the working people who are the backbone of our country, that’s not a bad thing at all.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Labor Issues, Economics, Employment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.