The boys, in Michael Moore's hometown of Flint, hard at work on the assembly line, being competitive against the Japanese, the Germans...Story here.
On this week in 1936, United Auto Workers' members occupied a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, staging a "sit-down strike" that resulted in the beginning of a thoroughly destructive exclusive labor agreement between the company and the union.Damn... even big business, even the fat-cat "corporo-fascists" (as a Leftist troll herein ironically called them not too long ago)... were bitten by the Bolshevist bug... short-term profit, however acquired, was seen as acceptable, no matter what the long-term consequences, as long as, for the time being, a bunch of "workers", just like the fancy-suited bigwig execs, are seen to benefit from the economy to a degree far greater than their actual market value.
With the eager acquiescence of corporate management, the UAW union bosses quickly set out upon a decades-long policy of bleeding the competitive life out of General Motors (and Chrysler and Ford). That policy helped the union emerge as an unrivaled political force and eminently wealthy special interest. But, the relationship was, if anything, parasitic.
(...)Bowing to each and every union demand with slavish obsequity, the Big Three management all but abandoned even the appearance of focusing on long-term viability rather than the next quarter's profits. As Noel Tichy, Noel Tichy, a University of Michigan business professor and author who ran General Electric Co.'s leadership program 1985-87 and once worked as a consultant for Ford, recently wrote, "There has been 30 years of denial. They did not make themselves competitive. They didn't deal with the union issues, the cost structures long ago, everything that makes a successful company…"
And as was all but inevitable, soon, both the union and the host will begin to disappear beneath the waves of a free market reality that American politicians can't bail them out of - no matter how much taxpayer money they throw at the problem.
Unions are great, for those lucky enough to belong to them and work as members of them.
However, unions aren't so great for business, nor for the economy. Not in the long run, anyway, certainly not if it costs the taxpayers billions and billions just to keep them afloat, just to make work for those special, exalted, entitled, elite unionists.
