I have never been part of a labor union so I'm not sure what to make of this or who to root for. Is it fair to root for the companies making billions after getting taxpayer help and making their workers take pay cuts in the crash of 2008? Should they share in the boon times with their workers? Executive pay is huge. Workers demand of a 32 hour work week but getting paid for 40 hours rubs me the wrong way. My father in law worked for GM for 40 years. When I was first dating my wife I went to her house one day and my boy had left a paycheck stub unattended on the kitchen counter. He never went to college. He was making over $75k a year. I was one year out of USC making $45k a year. I said to my wife, "wow, he makes good money. What does he do at GM?". She said , "well, he is on an assembly line, car chassis are moving above his head, a machine lifts a muffler up under the chassis and he jiggles it into place. " I said, "that's it?", yep for 8 hours he jiggles mufflers into place. Great pension and medical benefits.
Without a doubt the winds of change are coming to the auto industry. Everyone sees what the switch to electric cars will do to auto workers. Massive layoffs. Electric cars don't have a muffler to jiggle into place. Or an engine, or a transmission, or pistons, or oil filters or a bunch of hoses and wires. You don't need hardly close to the work force to build an electric car but the profit margins are higher. Electric cars don't need any maintenance and rarely need any repairs. In almost 5 years my Tesla has never been in the shop for maintenance or repairs. Not even once. What happens to the dealer mechanics who charge you $100 bucks an hour just to say , "Good morning, so what seems to be the problem? It's making a weird noise you say? We will need it to put it thru diagnostics. Pick it up in two weeks".The tab goes up from there. What about UPS drivers making $170,000 a year? Good for them, but they also seem to think that's not enough.
I worked with the UAW in my role in employee benefits. Back in the day they had it in their contract to get 30 viagra pills a month. Enough to harden the oceans twice over.
Turns out, UAW members took the five or six pills they needed a month to please the misses and sold the rest on the black market.
Let them strike. They turned down a 21% raise over 4 years. They're demanding 40%. The union Boss keeps pointing out that the CEOs and major stock owners etc are multimillionaires. Yep, it's their company, they built and funded it.
Then you have teachers always striking for better wages. Yet they knew the pay when they took the job.
My boss always told me if you don't like the pay or conditions quit. I'm not holding you here. Good Luck to you.
Until Japan shook things up, Detroit was turning out shit that should have shamed auto worker, who just didn't give a shit. My dad's LTD had more things wrong with it coming off the assembly line than I could have immaged. All kinds of shit didn't work, and the tire had a dhugh chunk out of it making driving dngerous.
Unions are double-edged swords. Abuse of power is inevitable in unions, but without any collective bargaining the worker will get fucked in the ass for sure. I was a Teamster for several years, I saw the pros and cons. Nobody can ever agree on what a "liveable wage" really is.
Unions would work well were it not for greed and corruption -- both within the unions and within the corporations they work for...not to mention political land mines and mob influence. Face it, we're humans so we're all fallible so we're fucked.
EV's have nothing to do with it ...in fact smart automakers are moving away from EV's....Ford is quickly transitioning to Hybrids and Toyota has said for more than t a couple years EV's are a waste of time...and beleives they have better technology than what EV's produce...
Bottom line...EV's find an qualified technician to work on them...impossible...in fact find a qualified mechanic ot work on a gas car and that is getting harder and harder to do..especially with allthe chips they have put in the damn things..
Manufacturers will have to decide whether to get more robots or move more production to Mexico.
I tend to side with whatever is best for me, a high quality item/service at a price that makes sense. How we get to that combination is none of my concern as long as we get there. The rest of it is all bullshit. I really don't care about anything else, nor do I feel that I should.
No one seems to remember that GM & Chrysler went bankrupt and Obama had to bail them out. At GM, if you werre layed off, the union contract specified that you would get 95% of your salary until re-hied. Since GM was selling fewer cars, they were never going to be re-hired. Obama also bailed out the UAW pension fund but confiscating pension funds from non-union workers, including the Indiana State Teachers Retirement fund. Meanwhile, manufacturers (other than Tesla, which is non-union) are losing money on EVs. If they win the strike, increased wages will lead to higher prices and fewer cars sold (remeber when Obama destroyed perfectly good used cars, thus driving up the price of used cars?). Lay-offs and automation to come.