“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.” — Abraham Lincoln; First Annual Message to Congress, December, 1861.
The autoworkers played no part in the mess in which the manufactures are now ensconced. They have given back, and they have given back, and they have given back, and they have gotten pitifully little in return.
As I noted earlier, my father worked most his life as a designer for Ford. And for all my developing years the Michigan manufacturers were bent by supreme arrogance. On the presumption they could make whatever they wanted and that Americans would have no choice but to buy vehicles designed to break down and wear out, “designed obsolescence,” they made vehicles that were shoddy and unsafe. “Hmggh . . . what are you going to do, buy some Japanese car, or a VW?” The UAW had no role in those arrogant designs. What the UAW did was to toil long and hard in the pits, assembling what was provided to them by management.
But it isn’t only management’s fault either. The ethereal whims of the American car-buying public share a goodly part of the blame. Prior to the late 70's Arab oil embargo, derision was all that met anyone who'd stoop so low as to have a Toyota or a Datsun (now Nissan) or a VW bug in the driveway. Come the embargo, and as there had never been a first suggestion by Americans they'd consider a smaller, more fuel efficient car, none were even on one of the Big-3's drawing boards, and the Toyotas and Datsuns and VWs began to sell. Detroit had been snookered by a marketing circumstance no one could have predicted, and a circumstance, the duration of which, no one could forecast. Almost as immediately as Detroit put a smaller, more fuel efficient version on the street, the embargo was over, gas prices and supplies stabilized, and the gas-guzzler was in; bigger than ever. Folks in Phoenix and Tampa who had never seen snow in their lives had to have the most humongous 4WD SUV they could lay their hands on. So, Detroit responded with the Lincoln Navigator and the Cadillac Escalade, and much of the country signed their names on first, second and third mortgages that were on reams of paper filled with snares and traps that few attorneys could comprehend, all to keep up with the neighbors.
And those mortgages were bundled by bankers, and shares were sold on those now securitized instruments around the globe. Everybody owned a piece of something, and no one was on the hook for much. "I'd like to renegotiate my loan, who do I go to?" "I don’t know. A thousand, maybe ten thousand investors around the world own a piece of it." When the balancing egg tumbled to the floor and cracked, as employers began to shut down and stopped paying workers to work producing things and services that no one wanted, as homes fell into the foreclosure abyss, everyone was to blame and no one trusted anyone, and no one would venture out onto the limb to buy a new car, or finance one.
It all began on the charade of "fair trade," that never was "fair". It was a Republican philosophy that overwhelmingly Democratic office holders purchased in toto. Ship US manufacturing jobs en masse to some Third World backwater site on the disingenuous guise that that will enable the country to which those jobs have been shipped to be an equal market for "other" US goods. Not that anyone ever specified what those equivalent US goods would be. No one had to. Just call it "fair trade" often enough and loud enough and, like some magician's coin, drawn from some foil's ear, voila it's "fair trade". And by some dint of self-contained, delusion of truth, the 40- and 50-something laid-off US workers would go to a community college for training in a much higher paying position in the high-tech industry, or perhaps as an EMT, and everyone would be a winner.
I don’t know what the answer is, to extend or not extend more taxpayer funds to the auto industry. I don’t like the idea, having to go to China or Mexico or South Korea or Japan for mechanized battle equipment, and for parts. Bankruptcy is not an option. No one will plop down $20,000-plus in cash, or sign a 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, or 7-year contract on a vehicle from a manufacturer who’s in bankruptcy. (Anything beyond three years is nuts, on its face. But hey! That’s what was going on.)
What I do know is that not a nickel’s worth of the over-the-cliff mess the industry is in is traceable to anyone in the UAW. Nonetheless, there’s an awful lot of Schadenfreude going around. “They just got greedy” is typical of a lot of what I hear. One, I’d like the name of just one line worker who, after spending 30 years on it, was wealthy as a result. Please, just one name. Two, as to “greedy;” when a man or woman works hard, damned hard, is it greedy to be able to live in a modest house, and able to raise a family in modest comfort, and take a few weeks off every year, to spend with the family, and to take a sick or injured child to the hospital without risking bankruptcy . . . Is that greedy?
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