Just out of curiosity, and because I’ve seen this point come up a few times here, how are the concessions that the republicans are asking for (iirc a deadline to reduce employee wages) going to “destroy labor?” Are we merely talking a slippery slope of reduced labor influence or is the destruction of labor one of the concessions that the media just isn’t covering?
I’ll go one better , Tarriff cars built outside of NAFTA and flood asia with surplus autos that are clogging up the system. Dont matter if they dont want them, ship em out , someone will buy em.
Declan
“Deserves”? A loaded word, subject to misunderstanding. Perhaps you could explain precisely what you mean by “deserve”?
Great idea! Stop the recession by turning it into a depression!
uh huh , then we will just keep this one sided and let them dump their ricers on us
Declan
Leaving aside for a moment all other issues of what is the best course of action, your comment here demonstrates nothing but complete fucking idiocy and ignorance.
Why doesn’t such a worker deserve a decent salary? Your apparent belief that workers without post-secondary education deserve low salaries simply because of their education level is fucking retarded nonsense. If the work they do adds value to the product produced by their employers, and value to the company, what does it matter whether they have a university degree?
In this particular case, it might be that the companies in question cannot afford to pay these sorts of wages and remain viable. But to simplistically connect education level and wages like you have done, and to suggest that there is never any justification for those without a university degree to be paid well, demonstrates nothing but your own stupidity.
All i can surmise is that your username refers to that fact that you were dropped on your head frequently as a child.
On a scale from zero to dumb, instigating a tariff war ranks somewhere between shaving your pubic hair with a chainsaw and drinking paint thinner because you’re thirsty. There are, technically, dumber ideas that exist. But there aren’t that many.
There is enough economic threads right now between GD, GQ , heck almost every forum but the cafe has one. The Great Depression one was exaserbated by tarriffs, ya got it, check mark on tradewars are a bad thing.
So fine , I never said all asian cars only the ones that are made outside of north america. I fail to see why a shit load of cars is sitting on the docks at long beach , coming in from china. Seriously what the fuck has china got any business selling cars here.
This also applies to the legacy three, provide an audited list of parts that comprise their vehicles. A certain percentage of parts comes from overseas , escalating tarriff.
Declan
China buys our debt.
China is a major trade partner.
It is unwise to piss off people who help you out. If I need to borrow ten bucks from a friend, I don’t kick him in the balls after he lends me the money. That would be uncouth.
Saying things like “Fail.” makes a person look like a douchenozzle, so I won’t. But you’ve failed to win this arguement:
Tell me how they’re making so much more than the UAW workers.
Eliminate the cost of health care benefits, they’re more equal. Plus, as has been noted above, the Big 3 have massive retirement costs. So we want to penalize the middle class for wanting health insurance and for the ability to retire? And we want them to take pay cuts to boot?
Talk about being on a race to the fucking bottom. There was a time in this country when we strived to bring up those workers who made less, instead of bringing down those that are making more. And when more workers made more money, more businesses prospered.
The other thing that pisses me off about all this is when people say that the Japanese companies are building fuel-efficient cars that people want to buy while the Big 3 have done nothing but build gas-guzzling dinosaurs. Well, for many years that’s what the American public wanted-- bigger and bigger gas-guzzlers-- so the Big 3 built them. The Japanese and European governments had stricter fuel standards, so they were building fuel-efficient cars before it was even what people wanted, simply because that’s what they were told to do by their governments. Then when gas soared, people turned their attention away from the American behemoths and toward the tiny Toyotas and Hondas, which were years ahead of the Americans when it came to fuel efficiency. Why were the Americans so far behind? Because management at the Big 3 continued to lobby against fuel standards, and Congressmen like John Dingell listened and made sure that our car companies weren’t forced to make cars that ran on less gas.
So blame the US Auto lobbyists, blame the John Dingells, blame the Japanese government, blame the gas-guzzling American public for not caring about fuel-efficiency. But the UAW laborers produced products that for many, many years made a boat-load of cash for the Big 3. They accordingly negotiated generous contracts for their workers to reap some of the rewards of those high profits. Now, as profits have gone away, the UAW has given a boat-load of money and benefits back in order to help keep things afloat. So I’m sick and fucking tired of people pointing the finger of blame on these workers as the sole reason for these cockchoking senators voting to block the Congressional funding. That’s like blaming the wife for the beating she got from her husband last night.
The UAW has made major concessions, and has played ball all throughout this process. They have been held to much more public scrutiny and examination and accountability than the banking industry which has been more at fault than the laborers for this economic downturn, and the financial industry has gotten 20 times the amount of cash that the auto manufacturers have asked for, with having to do absolutely no tap dancing for it.
Because people here want to buy their cars? If you can’t compete with foreign-built cars, how is that their fault?
I assume unless you’re a delusional insane person spewing random things or a shit eating spineless lier that you have a reputable cite for this cost assessment.
Keeping in mind our neighbors to the north pay 5% less then we do of it’s GDP (15 cents of every dollar we spend goes to healthcare, for Canadians it’s 10 cents of every dollar) and have little over half the cost per person as our half assed system ($6714 vs $3678).
Our cousins over the sea in England kick our half assed healthcare system’s butt too. England spends 8.4% of it’s GDP (if England used dollars they’d spend 8.4 cents of every dollar on healthcare. Half of what we spend) with a cost of $2760 per person (1/3 of what we pay).
Sounds like a damn good national investment to me. Especially consider all the employment problems idiot Republicans who hate the poor and middle class are causing these days.
Were. Were the most profitable areas. Care to place a wager on the profitability of SUV’s and Pickups between 2008-2028?
This being the only valid point you make, and it a niggling one. Some workers get laid off in the affected plants, sure, but the majority are kept on producing transitional crossovers lines to ween the nation off it’s SUV binge, modernizing the facilities in which they work, making the lines more efficient, etc. And I’m not asking a lineworker to design a car; I’m asking them to critique the assembly process itself. I know it rankles the upper-crust, but blue collar guys can be amazingly good at diagnosing and correcting productivity sinks in jobs they’ve been working for 20 or 30 years.
Worst case scenario-I still have to come hat in hand to the Fed for a bridge loan, just like today, except I already have my plants re-tooled to produce the cars that are going to be selling in the future, not the cars that were selling in the past.
The Big 3 is 5-6 years ahead because I just spent 5-6 years gearing my business model toward innovation (specifically fuel economy/hybrid technology), but you’d have known that if you had read for comprehension.
Or, if you prefer it in your oh so edgy style-
treis reading for comprehension=fail
From 1967 to 2003,the median income rose 29.9%, from $33,338 to $43,318. During the same period, the top 5% increased 73.8%, from $88,678 to $154,120. They effectively gained a middle-class and a half, and I’m going to need some sort of cogent justification for that disparity, as well as a refutation of this statement-
Before I get all riled up about Joe Uneducated Blow bringing home as much as your average Bachelor’s holder because he happens to be in the right industry.
Do not assume that this is the only reason that the United States pays more for healthcare. There are other factors like the US’s high obesity rate that must be taken into account.
True, but the US system also has alot of hidden costs from thngs that preventive care could have taken care of before they became a big expensive issue.
Even if we wrote the savings of preventative care off would you say the costs of obesity related problems are in the US are enough to account for double and triple the costs of elsewhere?
Also the poor tend to be subsidized by the rich and insured anyway. When ever a ooor person racks up a healthcare bill they have no hope of paying guess how the hospital covers it? They add it to everyone else’s bill in the form of increased costs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do this in way that didn’t result in life crippling debt and included access to medicine?
Chronic and long term conditions in the poor can go untreated till they’re crippled or dead. All and all it’s a backward ,3rd world style have and have not health care system we have in the good old US. There’s medicines that cost more per month then some people working full time make in a month. One of my mom’s medicines runs $800 a month. She’d be in real trouble without medicade.
oh and since this is the pit, let me add I hope Republicans responsible for blocking this are tied down while wild dogs chew on their testicles and cops from New York sodomize them with night sticks (this job needs someone with practice).
Sure, it’s the U.S. government’s own figure, taken from the U.S. Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2001-4. And I’m not going to hijack this thread into doing the health care debate for the one millionth time, but my point was that Jayjay said that health care costs were a big burden on the Big 3, having UHC would relieve them of that. Problem is, all that does is change who pays the money, and unless your position is that Barry’s proposed $1 trillion/year worth of deficit spending is just not enough by a factor of four, then the savings realized by the Big 3 will be negated by the increased tax burden they will have to cover it.
First off Thanks for your cite.
However I think my cite shows UHC is significantly cheaper then the current mess we have.
Even paying the taxes to support UHC the big 3 would still see some pretty decent savings if we could implement a system as good as Canada or the UK. As would the rest of the country, with decent increases in quality of life and life expectancy ta boot.
Just out of curiosity? OMG! Are you truly sincere? Well then, here it goes: the Republicans are only making demands of the Union, a constituency they do not represent, have always been the enemy of and routinely use as their straw man. The Republicans are owed zero favors by unions. Yet the only demand that they insist and will back away from the deal from they make is to the constituent of their opponent. All their other lesser demands have been met, and the UAW is willing to make some concessions, but concession that broke the elephant’s back is that the Union reduce their wage and benefit package to that of non-union workers, and not a penny less. Why would workers who unionize to gain bargaining strength willingly give up all of that advantage? No one would join the union and pay dues then, now would they? It is aimed solely at unions in a way that they cannot accept without admitting that they do not provide their only consitutent, their members, with substantial benefits. Benefits that workers in tough to unionize states cannot get. Now, the Federal government has the power to make union protection uniform in all states, are the Republicans willing to pass such law so that unions can organize equally in all states in a few years? Nope, never comes up.
Now, why haven’t the Republicans who do not want to outright destroy the American based auto industry call on their constituents: execs, management, bankers, investors, etc. to give something up? In fact, the Republicans object to exactly that when it comes to compensation caps. In the past dozen weeks the feds have guaranteed (through the Fed Reserve and Treasury) the investments of Republican constituents to the tune of $2.2 trillion dollars. Yet they refused any salary caps there, with salaries in excess of millions of dollars for top tiers. Yet when it comes to one-hundredth the size of the bailout, they scream only at their opponents about capping salaries to what it is in slave (er, former slave, er non-union) states. Just out of curiosity, why will Americans lend trillions to billionaires, but not billions to working people?
I don’t agree with much the Bush Administration has done, but saving the last biggest manufacturing industry in this country over its own party’s partisan opposition is one. I can’t think of another in the last 8 years.
But aren’t you concerned that a government that begins to interfere with “quality of life” issues is on the slippery slope to socialized existentialism?