Solidarity

Well, now, the GOP actually pulled off what they intended to: they busted the UAW. That such was the intention of the Republican senators was made explicit when they blocked the bill to bail out the automakers. They stated openly that the American automakers were failing due to the "overly generous" benefit packages given to workers, even though the UAW had just made enormous concessions as part of the "plan" Chrysler and GM had to put together to get the funds. I was somewhat surprised by the senators' move, but I shouldn't have been. The fix was already in. They knew the administration would find a way to bail the companies out, and I suspect they also knew that part of the administration's plan would be to effectively defang the unions. That's exactly what happened.

The Washington Post has a reasonably accurate assessment of the resulting deal.

The $17.4 billion federal loan agreement does keep the domestic auto industry alive. But the terms of that loan also insist that the wages and benefits for union workers be lowered to "equal" the average of nonunion workers, specifically, those at the U.S. plants of Nissan, Toyota and Honda.

Those and other concessions would essentially erase the significant distinctions between union and nonunion auto workers, and the lack of such union worker advantages would render moot the union's fundamental purpose, some industry analysts and labor experts said.

What the article fails to consider is that the reason the workers in the "transplants" get as much as they do in terms of hourly wage, health insurance, and pension benefits is the union contracts negotiated for the past fifty years by the UAW. The hourly wage is lower (by about $4 per hour, on average), but the other benefits are roughly equivalent. The real difference in labor costs at this point involves pension benefits. The foreign plants haven't been open long enough to accrue the sheer numbers of retirees that GM, Chrysler, and Ford have. They will, however, catch up, and once that happens, the costs will be comparable. That the workers in the Japanese "Big Three" get what they do is still the result of the hard fought battles of the UAW.

By busting the UAW, however, that may not be the case in the future, and the real losers will be the workers, organized or not, a fact which apparently has been noticed by at least some Democrats.

At a news conference in Chicago yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama said that workers should not be the ones "taking all the hits" and that all stakeholders "are going to have to play a part in this process."

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the committee overseeing much of the government financial rescue efforts, was far tougher.

"The president has added an unfair assault on working men and women, which could require them to accept a disproportionately large reduction in what is currently legally owed to them," he said in a statement. "I am particularly opposed to the notion . . . that could give foreign auto companies in effect the ability to dictate wages for all American auto workers."

Frank said that because those requirements were "unilaterally inserted" by Bush, the Obama administration "should take whatever steps are necessary to remove them."

Noticing is one thing, but doing something about it is another. By January 21, 2008 the Hooverights will have at least theoretically even less of a say in what gets done and how. Unless Democratic leadership changes its modus operandi dramatically, however, that won't matter.

Heckuva job, Harry Reid.