The Punditocracy vs. the UAW

Today on TAP: Commentators argue that the union is asking for too much. But a big win may help the UAW organize the non-union competition.

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Yesterday, what we might politely term the non-labor wing of the Democratic punditocracy weighed in on the UAW strike against GM, Ford, and Stellantis. They didn’t like it.

To be sure, both Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell and investment banker and Obama 2009 auto bailout czar Steven Rattner, writing in The New York Times, acknowledged that the union’s wage demands were basically just, and that Big Three companies should have long since mitigated some of the concessions (like the creation of a lower-paid tier of workers) that the union agreed to make when the companies faced bankruptcy in 2009. They conceded that the gap between the companies’ CEO pay and median worker pay had risen to obscene levels, and, in sum, that the workers had every right to be very angry at their employers, who’d been making record profits in recent years.

And yet, both charged that the union was asking for way too much, such as the restoration of the yearly cost-of-living adjustments and defined-benefit pensions that the UAW, under Walter Reuther’s leadership, had won in 1950. The problem, they said, was that actions like these would render the Big Three woefully uncompetitive with the non-union auto plants in the South, the low-wage auto plants in Mexico, and Elon Musk’s non-union Tesla factory in California and battery factory in Nevada.

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The psychopathically anti-union Wall Street Journal went further than that yesterday, with two articles comparing the productivity and cost of American workers unfavorably to the productivity and cost of workers (and robots) in East Asia, most particularly in China. As the Journal was the leading editorial voice demanding that the U.S. establish permanent normal trade relations with China back in the 1990s, the fact that the U.S.-China wage differential is an issue at all should really be laid at the Journal’s door. Causing this problem wasn’t bad enough, apparently; now they have the chutzpah to bemoan it.

But the complaint common to all these arguments is accurate as far as it goes. It’s indisputable that adopting even just some of the wage and benefit proposals the union is putting forth will widen the current gap between, say, what GM workers make, and the life that enables them to live, and what Tesla workers make, and the life that compels them to endure. The question is whether the contracts the UAW will win will lead to the rest of the industry leveling wages and working conditions up, or whether the labor standards in China, Alabama, and Elonland will level wages and working conditions down. The combination of a big UAW win and the new organizing rules promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board might just enable the union to organize some of those lower-wage plants, or at least compel them to raise wages and benefits to fend off the union’s campaigns.

I should add that the complaint that the UAW’s proposals could lead to the companies’ shortchanging investments in innovation and such might be received a tad less skeptically had the complainants also bemoaned the series of stock buybacks that the top executives at GM and Ford have repeatedly authorized, thereby shortchanging investments in innovation and such in favor of boosting the value of the shares with which they themselves are paid. Over the past decade, GM has bought back $14.8 billion of its own shares, and Ford, $3.4 billion.

And while we’re on the subject of double standards, I note that the Justice Department is now investigating Tesla for what the Journal terms “Tesla’s use of company resources on a secret project that was described internally as a house for Musk.” Coincidentally, one of the recent past presidents of the UAW secretly directed union funds to build himself a house. Not only did he end up doing hard time, but the Justice Department compelled the UAW to elect its new officers by a vote of the rank and file, which led to the election of Shawn Fain and his reformer regime. It would be nice to think that a similar administering of justice awaits Tesla and Musk.

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