By Berry Craig
MAYFIELD, Ky. – The union-haters are claiming the “greedy” United Auto Workers derailed the federal bailout for financially-strapped Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
Of course, union haters never let facts stand in the way of their labor-bashing.
The UAW has made concessions, big-time. A group of fiercely anti-union Republican senators used the union’s stand against more concessions as a pretext to scuttle the $15 billion aid package the House passed.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the other Republicans who blocked the bailout bill must have figured they were in a win-win situation. If the UAW knuckled under to their demands for more concessions, the union would be weakened. If the union refused, McConnell and company would have an excuse to nix the bailout and blame the “selfish” UAW.
Not coincidentally, several of the senators who opposed the bailout are from Southern right-to-work states that are home to foreign-owned, non-union auto plants. According to the Associated Press, Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW’s international president, suggested that the bailout-busting lawmakers “thought perhaps they could have a twofer here maybe: Pierce the heart of organized labor while representing foreign brands.”
It didn’t surprise Jeff Wiggins that McConnell opposed the bailout. “Mitch despises unions at the gut-level,” said Wiggins, a Steelworker and member of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO Executive Board. “He never misses a chance to hammer unions. He’s willing to destroy the American auto industry to destroy the UAW.”
Border state Kentucky isn’t a right-to-work state. “To get around that, McConnell favors a national right-to-work law,” said Wiggins, who is also president of the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, which is headquartered in Paducah.
Meanwhile, conservative pundits – who have had little to cheer about since the election – have declared open season on the UAW. But even supposedly objective news reporting “is all about how the greedy auto workers and their unions refused to accept the oh-so-reasonable compromise proposed by Senate Republicans that would require them to quickly drop their wages and benefits to match those of foreign-owned plants,” wrote Daphne Eviatar on the Washington Independent Internet website.
She added: “None of the mainstream news coverage I’ve seen – whether in the New York Times, Washington Post or CBS news – mentions the fact that Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and his fellow Republicans are from the same Southern states where those foreign companies own and operate auto plants – none of which are unionized, and all of which provide lower wages and fewer benefits than the Big Three.”
Eviatar is right. What’s also interesting – but almost never makes the news – is the fact that foreign auto manufacturers who have non-union plants in the U.S. have unionized plants back home.
Eviatar also pointed out that while the Republican “free enterprisers” oppose federal aid to unionized Detroit automakers, they see no problem in luring non-union foreign plants to their neck of the woods with generous state subsidies. (Toyota got almost $150 million in tax breaks and other goodies financed by Kentucky taxpayers to open a plant in Georgetown.)
McConnell and his Southern Republican soul-mates also are fond of wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes – some of them the Confederate Stars and Bars, too -- and portraying themselves as true patriots. Yet, as Eviatar aptly observed, they are glad to “represent their foreign car corporation constituents” and “are eager to break the [American] auto workers union – now.”
She also wrote that workers at non-union, foreign-owned car plants make fairly close to what union workers make at American car plants. Thus, a lot of the Southern non-union workers think they don’t need a union. (No doubt McConnell and his sidekicks hoped if they could equalize union and non-union pay and benefits by coercing the UAW to make more concessions, Northern auto workers might think they didn’t need a union either.)
But Eviatar added that it’s UAW-won wages that fatten non-union auto plant worker paychecks. If foreign-owned plant owners paid their workers a lot less than American plant owners pay their union workers, the non-union workers might -- you guessed it – join the UAW.
If the UAW went away, the wages of every car plant worker would sink like the Titanic. “That would make Mitch very happy,” Wiggins said.
Meanwhile, the UAW has made significant concessions to the U.S. auto makers. “…In 2005 the UAW agreed to reopen the contracts mid-term and accepted cuts in workers’ wages and health care benefits for retirees,” Gettelfinger told the U.S. House of Representatives. “Then in the general 2007 collective bargaining negotiations, the UAW agreed to what industry analysts have called a ‘transformational’ contract that fundamentally altered labor costs for the Detroit-based auto companies.”
He added that “as a result of all these painful concessions, the gap in labor costs that had previously existed between the Detroit-based auto companies and the foreign transplant operations will be largely or completely eliminated by the end of the contracts. Indeed, one industry analyst has indicated that labor costs for the Detroit-based auto companies will actually be lower than those for Toyota’s U.S. operations.”
Maybe McConnell’s friends at Toyota will give him an especially nice present this Yuletide. Bless his heart, Mitch’s dobber has been down since Nov. 4.
Kentucky voters almost retired him. While his presidential candidate – another right-wing, pro-right-to-work Republican senator -- carried Kentucky, he lost the election. At the same time, the Democrats increased their House and Senate majorities.
But that’s not all that’s curdling Mitch’s eggnog. His wife, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, will soon be unemployed.
“We had hoped to ditch Mitch,” Wiggins said ruefully. “But at least his wife, the anti-labor labor secretary, will be out of a job when Barack Obama is sworn in.”
