I was reading a book about the wreck of the US auto industry, and it seems that the UAW had acquired tremendous power over the firm. The union was (essentially) dictating the work environment to management-telling them :
-what jobs its members could do (over 30 job classifications)
-telling management how many cars per hour it would build
-preventing incompetent workers from being fired
-requiring laid off workers to be paid (the “jobs bank”)
It is no wonder that GM had the highest labor costs in the industry. The UAW also killed the SATURN division, as it did not like the fact that all Saturn workers were cross-trained for different jobs.
Or take the Japanese transplants-the workers at Honda were paid comparable hourly wages, but it was expected that they would shift jobs, as demand changed. thus, when there was a line breakdown, everybody scrambled and worked to get things up and running, while at GM, you had to have meeting with the union stewards, and decide who could do what-while the line went idle.
Do the GM line workers understand what the UAW has done to them? It seems that the union doesn’t see that a healthy GM is vital to keeping their jobs-while at Honda, each worker realizes he has a personal stake in the success of the company.
What really got me was the statement of the UAW boss at the Saturn plant:“my job is to see that the management (GM) cannot manage”-what a stupid thing to say.
So, was the UAW to balme for a big part of GM’s problems?
A lot. But not nearly as much as the shitty products GM turned out for thirty years.
Would the Japanese auto workers have been well paid if UAW hadn’t struck for decent pay and benefits decades ago?
I’m thinking management would have ‘just said no’ to anything short of organized labor action.
Perhaps the bosses brought the union on themselves by being assholes?
Which book?
It’s pretty obvious that management and the unions are in cohorts to fuck the workers - what is going on.
You do realize that the quality of the products are directly related to the quality of the workers building them?
I think the Japanese have a very different attitude about work than most Americans. In Japan, workers seem to have a lot of dedication to the success of their company. Americans, in contrast, tent to be lazy and entitled. In a typical manufacturing environment, the people who actually build the products tend to have less education while management is typically college or grad school educated. They are two distinct classes with separate hiring, career tracks and organizational structures.
I’m sure the structure is similar in Japan, but they seem to have less of a “fuck you” attitude about work.
I fear individual answers are simply going to fall along personal bias for or against unions.
I’m probably as anti-union as it gets, so I’ll happily lay all of the blame on the UAW. I also have no problem blaming unions for most of the problems with the airline industry. They also tend to fuck up health care and education.
For a slightly less biased position: during the heydays when American auto manufactures were raking in cash, the UAW fought on behalf of the works (or at least pretended to) and made sure their compensation grew along with company profits. Ditto in the airline industry. As I said in my other thread, business is there to make profit, by fucking employees. Unions are there to get benefits, by fucking profit. A company doesn’t have to give a shit about the welfare of their employees, and a union doesn’t have to give a shit about the welfare of the company.
Problem was, that when management fucked up and started producing seriously shitty cars that couldn’t compete with foreign made, combined with easing of trade restrictions protecting them, profits fell hard. But the nature of unions is to grow, continuously, no matter what. So when benefits needed to be cut, and wages needed to be lowered, the unions refused.
GM is going to start being extremely profitable in the next few years thanks to bankruptcy protection allowing them to renegotiate contracts and term. Again ditto for the airline industry a few years ago.
In the end, I think the real blame was on management allowing legacy benefits (pensions) that were based on continuous growth. Before they went into bankruptcy GM was required to provide benefits to three generations of workers, but had to fund it from their current and much smaller work force.
And they made shitty cars.
Building them, or designing them?
At least part of that can be attributed to a cradle-to-grave social contract for the largest firms - i.e. the companies had a strong dedication to their employees as well in an almost quasi-feudal, paternalistic sense. Whether this will be sustainable ( on both sides ) in the long run seems to still be debated.
Japanese employees are more loyal to their employees, but the employees are more loyal to them. Also, in Japan there is less of a difference between executive compensation and average wages.
Detroit’s main mistake was to build SUVs when other countries emphasized fuel efficiency. The labor unions were not to blame for that.
This is a key distinction. Even assuming that the UAW is ultimately responsible for build quality - a dubious proposition at best - I’m talking more about the shoddiness of the product design.
Although building shitty cars, and failing to recognize the trend towards fuel efficiency ended up destroying the big three, I’m pretty sure that the legacy benefits would have eventually sucked them under. Even if they were smart enough to cash in on the SUV phase then seamlessly roll out a line of high efficiency vehicles, it would just mean they’d have 4 or 5 generations of workers to support. They were doomed from the moment they came up with that ridiculous plan.
What happened was a difference in philosophy in upper management. When the CAFE standards were enacted Japanese auto manufacturers went out and hired a bunch of engineers to meet the standards. US manufacturers went out and hired a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists to beat the standards. You can see how it all worked out.
My father was a UAW member and I’d have to say quite a lot. Obviously GM was the weakest of the lot, since Ford and Chrysler managed to survive without filing for bankruptcy. The trouble was that the UAW was run for the benefit of the senior members and the overall long term health of the auto industry and even the junior members of the union didn’t really figure into their strategy. Layoffs didn’t cause them of a problem, since the rules meant that usually effected the junior members.
The auto companies didn’t much care about this, because the UAW guaranteed them a level playing field with their domestic competitors, so the system was actually pretty stable until the Japanese starting making cars that could compete in the US market.
Since there wasn’t much give in the UAW, the reaction of the US Auto Industry was to move a lot of manufacturing and the jobs that went with it, offshore.
Not true. When SUVs were hot they were making incredible profits. They would have been stupid not to make them. The Japanese quickly started making them too to get on the gravy train. The profit per unit was amazing in those days.
The problem comes from what they did with the profits. Instead of investing in electric and high mileage cars that almost everybody knew were coming, they paid huge stock dividends, gave great bonuses and rewarded themselves with huge salaries at the top. It was greed instead of business management that won. It is always short term greed that wins in America.
Chrysler filed for bankruptcy and is by far the weakest of the 3.
Ira Glass had an interesting take on this topic. (This American Life)
The podcast is worth a listen.
You make it sound as though the automakers didn’t pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars to see things like that coming.
It was especially unforgivable because they got to watch it happening to their subsidiaries in the British motor industry twenty years earlier.
How much does the cost of health care factor into this? GM promised great health benefits to workers and retirees a long time ago, and then the cost of those benefits went through the roof, far higher than GM contemplated when they made the deals.