Sunday, December 21, 2008

Ex-CAW Bigwig Hargrove Doesn't Get It

Buzz Hargrove, former CAW head, doesn't understand microeconomics at all and thinks it's possible to keep the same size labor force even though the Detroit Three and its Canadian arms will indubitably be producing fewer vehicles in the future, as has been the continuing case in the past as they lost huge amounts of market share to foreign automakers, reducing production and workforce as a matter of course. If they hadn't, then they'd have collapsed and wouldn't be around today.

It's basic economics, and the communistic Hargrove doesn't understand that.

See- he says:

"The responsibility of our government, if they're going to put money in now, was to guarantee the current levels of production that we have in our Canadian plants," Hargrove said Sunday on CTV's Question Period. "And none of that was part this package announced yesterday."

You see, what Hargrove wanted was for government to keep the same number of people working no matter what.

Simply giving money to the automakers to keep people producing all those vehicles that people are no longer buying, just to keep people working... will lead to ever-expanding inventories that aren't going to be sold, except at massive, devastating losses, and this will only postpone the obviously coming end of the Detroit Three, as such a situation cannot continue forever.

What Hargrove wants is communism, useless, ultimately unworkable communism. He wants to create a supply that far outstrips demand, even as demand shifts towards the obviously most-often superior product offerings of the more-efficient, smarter foreign automakers.

Hargrove is closed-minded and unrealistic, failing to understand that, as economies and industries adapt to changing realities, workers must also face uncertainty as well and some will lose their jobs. This is natural, if unfortunate. We all understand this, unless we're in denial and/or believe we're entitled to keep our current jobs no matter what. Such denial is nothing short of mentally-disordered communism, pure and simple, particularly as Hargrove appears to be demanding that the government take responsibility for the jobs and guarantee them no matter what. How unrealistic.

Hargrove said that any concessions by the Canadian arms of Chrysler and GM should not come on the backs of auto workers, whose union contracts have been partly blamed for the companies' economic woes.


Wonder if he'd have said the same of the buggy whip industry when it became clear that it was being replaced by the automobile industry? Would it make sense to continue making millions of buggy whips a year even though only a tiny handful of folks need them anymore, like for quaint, historical reasons, like big, living olden-days museums such as New Brunswick's King's Landing?

"To say that the auto workers have to pay more to me doesn't recognize the reality of what our members and their families and the communities that they live in are facing," Hargrove said.

Listen, Buzz... there's people outside the auto industry who are already and more who will suffer far, far more, via losing their jobs completely, than the autoworkers will "suffer" if they make some reasonable concessions to try to keep as many jobs as they can, not that they will all be able to keep them all, barring an economic miracle or virtually-impossible sudden change in the competitive picture, like the foreign automakers suddenly going out of business or being destroyed by, say, Iranian, Chinese, North Korean, Russian, etc. nuclear bombs overseas...

Get real, Buzz. Give your head a shake and accept the real world as it is and also realize that communism doesn't work in the long run... just look at all the thousands and thousands and thousands of factories in Communist China that have already shut down recently (about 11,000 a month shut down, and millions of Chinese losing their jobs).

Besides, a communist government wouldn't be the kind that has to worry about accountability, so they'll let the jobs go extinct, despite the grandoise, impossible, utopian promises they made when they came to power (perhaps via a coup d'etat, like your comrades, the Liberals, NDP and Bloc conspired to have just a little while ago!).

This Hargrove guy also probably conveniently lapses into denial about the supposedly-man-made "global warming" and "climate change" stuff when asked whether jobs in the big-truck factories, like Hummer, Suburban et al, should continue to exist even though it's clear that they're not selling anywhere as well as they were prior to the gas price crunch and the global economic downturn. And he's delusional if he believes that Detroit can suddenly sell as many small cars as it was selling trucks, when the foreign marques already dominate the sector with superior, always-a-generation-ahead, offerings, like the Honda Civic, which is now the bestselling American vehicle, trading places with the Ford F-Series. I mean, it's not going to be easy for the new Chevy Cruze to compete with the established Japanese and Korean makes, particularly given the differences in the respective automakers' cost-structures due to labor and other costs.

So even if jobs are shifted from the production of the gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing behemoths to the efficient small cars and crossovers and so on, there cannot be a guarantee that the same number of jobs can economically be maintained. Having too many workers producing too many more vehicles than can be sold... won't help the North American industry compete and survive and will only delay the inevitable, which is collapse. But what does a communist care?

The greedy, delusional unions, particularly their dictatorial, tyrannical leadership who prefer to arrogantly tell the workers what's what than to listen to them and allow them to decide for themselves, will perhaps go down in history as the cause of the death of the North American automotive industry.