There's been a lot of talk about the roughly $10 more an hour that G.M. workers get paid than non-unionized American employees of Japanese car companies. Add another $15/hour for legacy pension and healthcare costs, and there's one of the reasons that G.M. has a hard time competing.
But there's been a right-wing tendency to think that if we just "break the unions," all will be well in America. But if all that was ailing G.M. was relatively high labor costs, the cars would just be more expensive than Japanese cars. But they're not particularly costly — the problem is that they're poorly made, and don't sell well when competing against the Japanese competition, particularly since the bottom has fallen out of the SUV and truck market with high fuel costs and then the recession.
The biggest problem has been appallingly bad management. But don't take my word for it. Check out this chart from U.C. Davis transportation expert Daniel Sperling (inset), who lists serious errors made by G.M. since the 1990s. Some of my favorites: They spent $4 billion buying Fiat, realizing that was a mistake, and then selling it back including penalties. They vigorously, and for the most part successfully, lobbied against mileage standards and tougher clean-air rules. They spent $1 billion developing electric vehicles, and then crushed them all. They spent $9 billion buying back stock in the 90s, and then said they didn't have the money to develop fuel-efficient vehicles.
I'm a pro-labor, progressive Dem, but even so I'm pretty unhappy having to bail out G.M. now, and presumably again once the big O takes office.
And no, Sperling doesn't think the much ballyhooed Volt will save GM either — due to relatively primitive state of the battery technology, it'll be too expensive with too short a range to become a hit like the Prius. You can see his lecture, which touches on G.M. briefly amdist a general discussion of the policy and ecological challenges of transportation, here…
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “Why I Fear For My Child’s Ability to Buy a Pontiac Vibe (Andrew)”
Kausfiles should be renamed Kausfool. Does that guy have any claim to his continued hold on that platform other than the nostalgia of some segment of the blog public who remember, with nostalgia, that he was one of the first? If I want breathless use of multiple exclamation marks, I’d rather read Gawker. At least it’s not so inane.
As you know, Andrew, even my father, who has written on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal (hardly a bastion of liberalism) that he thinks the big three need to go into Chapter 11 in part so that they can renegotiate their labor contracts, refuses to point the finger at unionization as the cause of the car makers’ troubles. I liked his rebuttal to that opinion when it was expressed at the annual Levine Hanukkah shindig: “Unions are just contractors for labor.” The finger pointing at unions, and away from the terrible management errors that you rightly highlight (and the historic structural/regulatory problems that my father would point to), strikes me less even than right wing than simpleminded Dittohead cant.
There are trigger concepts on both the left and right– deregulation and deinstitutionalization are two that cross political boundaries– that have been so co-opted by sloppy media and political use that their primary purpose by those who use them often seems to be to short-circuit thought. Unionization is one of those concepts. Unions give power to groups of individuals who are comparatively powerless acting alone. Groups of individuals can do good things with power or bad things. I’m a fan of collective action, but I know no more a priori about whether the product of union negotiation is good, than I do about whether a political decision has been good because it’s the product of a democracy.
Did I mention how annoying I find Micky Kaus?
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Well-put Anna. I too think that unions are not innately good or evil institutions. I do think there is a need for working-class people to defend their interests, and that unions are one flawed means to do that, in a political field that is otherwise indifferent.
On that subject, the NY Times had an interesting summary of the battle in Washington over whether unions can gain representation in a company through a majority of employees signing cards. As opposed to the process now: a secret ballot that is held after a 2 month period in which the companies actively discourage unionization while organizers are barred from company property:
As for Kaus, I second your thumbs-down.
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