If only the UAW would allow it? The fuck! Translation: if only they'd agree to be as poor as Brazilians and work for next nothing on our assemblylines. We love the profit we're making in America but we're damned if we want to support Americans by paying a living wage. Not when we can go to some underprivileged country where the citizens are happy with pay below the poverty line and don't expect little things like being able to afford three squares a day or health care.

Don't get me started. If only there were laws that made outsourcing so costly that anyone doing business (and taking their profit from our economy) in America were forced to give jobs to Americans. And, yes, pay them enough to have a middle class standard of living.

Donna, I agree with you. The same arguments can be made about companies here in the USA who like to exploit illegal aliens. But the other side of this is that unions are far more interested in keeping their members dismissal-proof than they are in raising standards of quality.

My brother did a brief stint in a factory in a nearby town and told us about an employee who abused drugs. The guy wasn't showing up for work, but the company couldn't fire him because he was a union member. Instead, they had to send him to treatment for two weeks, paying his wages and also paying for his treatment. He comes back to work for two weeks and then starts abusing drugs again. So it's back to treatment, in a never-ending cycle of the company paying a lot of money for this guy and getting very little work out of him.

As much as I really do agree with what you said above, when I see this other extreme I don't blame companies. They just want someone who will show up and work hard all day for crying out loud, and some of these unions have the biggest, most misplaced sense of entitlement you can imagine. Competitive wages, yes, I can see that. But a lifetime of medical benefits and pensions? No one else in the American workplace is getting those things, what makes these union people think they are so special? They are cooking the golden goose. Eventually their jobs just leave, and then where are they?

When I got out of college with a four-degree in accounting (in 1992) the job market totally sucked. I worked in an office with a whole bunch of other college graduates with degrees in accounting (which was supposed to be a safe, employable field) and we all made $7.00 an hour. We were all working second jobs, and a local tire factory's union went on strike around that time. This dirtbag was on TV, bitching that he didn't see how companies expected people to support families on $13.00 an hour. Shit, for that much money per hour I could have quit my second job and still been thousands of dollars a year ahead.

I lost a LOT of sympathy for unions at that point.

There are two sides to the coin. When I was installing a computer system in a sewage plant, I saw the other side of the unions - the side that is killing American heavy industry.

We needed to check whether wires had been correctly run from our computer to each sensor. In order to do this, there was one of us on each end: one running the computer and one at the sensor. The sensors were in the sewage treatement area and subject to union rules. What this meant was that I was not allowed to touch anything. Instead:

- A supervisor had to be present, because he knew where all the sensors were located. This guy was actually necessary.

- A mechanical type had to be present to unscrew the cover. This involved using a screwdriver.

- An electrician had to connect the meter to the wires. This involved two alligator clips attached to the obvious wires.

- An instrumentation person had to read the meter.

So there was a parade of five people wandering around where two would have done. Reading the article on the Brazilian plant, this is the sort of idiocy they are escaping: each person is not only allowed but encouraged to do multiple jobs. Maybe a single person would be allowed to use a screwdriver, attach wires and read the result.

I vehemently disagree with Donna & Pirate Jo. What has occurred in Detroit with The Big Three is not a whole lot different than the initial major plotline in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". You simply can't have a large company run by the union leadership rather than by management.

What has occurred in Detroit is that its growing labour costs have priced itself out of existence. There's no denying of that fact.

Japanese auto plants in America are thriving. The people there are making good wages, seem to love their jobs, and are super productive.

One can hold up their fists and shout "Down with the Man" and "Union Brothers and Sisters in Solidarity" ad nauseum but if someone else can build the same or a better product for less by sidestepping this whole union-management nonsense then all the rants in the world are for naught.

Having grown up in Saginaw and being a child of a 40-year GM employee, I can totally see how the union has yet again screwed over their people. All the UAW really cares about is that deduction they're getting from everyone's paycheck.

Unions were useful back in the day when there was no OSHA or labor boards to monitor working conditions. That era has long since passed. Now it seems the union's job is only to protect the laziest workers in the plant and collect that payroll deduction each week.

The UAW should have gone the way of the dinosaur a long time ago.

Not to jump on the bandwagon, but I gotta be me. I grew up around Detroit as well, and can attest to much of what you are all saying as to the union mentality. What's worse, the graft gimme gimme game has spread throughout the city. My dad shuttered the doors on his company last year (it was located in the Motor City) for two reasons; the Michigan economy (duh!) and the off-the-books cost of doing business, like buying a $2000 "fundraiser dinner ticket" for Kwame (hint to the naive- there never is a dinner)And when you have a janitor pushing a broom in a automotive plant who's making $42 an hour because he's been union for 36 years, or a guy gets paid $31 an hour NOT to work, ( http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0510/17/A01-351179.htm), how can anyone defend said UAW?

"And, yes, pay them enough to have a middle class standard of living." Skilled labor getting a middle class living sure, most do. The idea of some high school drop out, dumb as pig iron getting a middle class life style for putting bolts in a car frame is offensive to those of us (filthy immigrants and locals alike) who actually made something of our selves.

BTW if the bottom of the barrel (unskilled labor) are getting a "middle class wage" then wouldn't that make the middle class poor?

See the big thing that makes this plant profitable is the brain dead labor was replaced with robots and a small skilled (note key word) that gets paid well and does their job.

Giving good paying jobs to unskilled labor is the same thing as giving free money to the willfully unemployed for life. Learn some useful skills or frag off.

Robert W., if you read my post, I don't know where you got the idea that I disagree with you.

Adding to what has been said, I saw an article in Time or Newsweek last year that talked about the astounding high school dropout rates in the Rust Belt. The focus of the article was how schools disguise their true dropout rates in order to get federal funding.

They featured a school in Indiana and showed a picture of a typical dropout - a trashy-looking teenaged girl wearing too much make-up and driving a Camaro. She had spent most of her time in high school skipping class and riding around in her car with her friends. Then, when she started flunking out, she went back to the school and found that guess what, they didn't want to bother trying to catch her slacker ass up. The article seemed to sympathize with her, but I didn't see why the teachers should have to ignore the students who worked hard, after she had blown her chance at a perfectly good free education through her own laziness and stupidity. By the time the article was written she was 18 and trying to get a GED, since she can't get a job that pays more than minimum wage.

I wondered where in blazes her parents were in this picture. The article alluded to the fact that many of the parents of these kids were also high school dropouts, but they lived in an era where they could get great-paying union jobs and it didn't matter whether they had a high school diploma or not. Well, now we can see where those chickens have come home to roost.

I don't see why some dummy who drops out of high school should feel entitled to the same standard of living as someone who worked his butt off and studied hard. Machines and Mexicans can do a better job for a lot less money, and as someone who is in the Ayn Rand free market camp, I say let 'em.

However.

In the interest of a balanced view, and why I partially agree with Donna above, I submit the following:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/28/beck.immigrantworkers/

(Keeping fingers crossed that this post will go through.)

This fuel price deal is going to wake unions up, and possibly management and workers up, like the original "fuel crisis" did 30 years ago.

You might remember that Lee Iacocca got a $5 billion Federal-guaranteed loan to retool, got UAW to take a pay cut and paid the loan back early with a new product line.

Now, the industry is not only going to have to come up with small cars that aren't crap, they might actually have to build something that lasts. Today, cars are expendable - even as American car companies tried to get legislation to make people come to them for service for the first 10 years or so because they were lasting longer.

And maybe Americans will decide that paying huge $$ for something to sit in the driveway or parking lot 20+ hours is stupid. I know that already.

People, check your auto expenses - and then look at why you can't send your kid to college!

Pirate Jo, I just re-read your comments, much more carefully this time. My apologies.

A question for my American friends: Are there any similarities between the UAW and the Teachers Unions in your country?

Put another way, do any of the problems with those schools that are failing have anything to do with the mentality of the Teachers Unions?

Hey Robert W., no problem. What country are you from?

Oh dear, you had to bring up the teachers unions. But I will spare you a diatribe. This explains it quite well:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36802.html

Be sure to click on the pdf file at the bottom.

Yikes, that seems even more convoluted than the logic behind the "Human Rights" Commissions in my country of Canuckistan.

I simply can't believe that things have always been this bad in our countries. Short of a revolution, is there any way to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

Its a cynical cynical world, my town San Luis Potosi Mexico the rich leaders pay millions to have GM, they give them FREE land and bus in people who make minimum wage, they take kickbacks - uh duh - they sell it saying ¨we are creating jobs" - well when GM wants to leave they will. Unions really f-ed it up yet in the 1980´s the rich republicans set out to bust them and succeeded. If you look at executive compensation packages and how many middle class dumb as pig iron people these zillions could support perhaps its worth having some at least lower mid class dumb as pig iron people to turn those screws. but we are a world economy....

Hey Hoffman was probably a Spanish Jewish landowner before USA either stole, bought or was given California in 1850ísh

Glad someone brought up the teacher's union. Talk about fucking up education, you can't fire a sex predator, much less a crappy teacher. I am anti-union. They take a LOT of your money, and do nothing for you. Want a raise? Negotiate with your boss yourself, and deserve it first!

And the UAW has itself to blame for losing jobs. I am against off-shoring, but sometimes there's no choice. I'd be damned if I'd pay some lazy bum $15 a hour to turn a screw.

And yeah, what is with all these drop-outs? Just more welfare class-to-be. I think you should have to prove you deserve welfare before you get on it. As in, "my kid got really sick and we ran up medical bills and I got fired for missing too much work". Not "I dropped out of school because it was a bummer, and now I need money". I HATE entitle-ers!!!!!!!!

Or, we could just find a way to stop these slackers from breeding.........

Vlad, stop over-reacting when someone condemns illegal immigrants for working subpar. We're not attacking legal immigrants. Just criminals who work no benefits below minimum wage.

I agree that unskilled should not get what skilled does but poor should mean you live in lesser housing and have a fondness for beans and rice rather than steak, and go to the clinic for your medical care, not that famous doctor. It shouldn't mean you have to have 2 or 3 roommates in a small apartment just to have a roof over your head and no medical care available.

But you do bring up another good point and well taken. Technological advancement (your reference to the robots doing the unskilled labor) and the problems that causes with replacing human jobs. It's always been the case with progress that it does so and so far manageably. Not in your lifetime, perhaps, or mine, but sooner or later, technology will replace us all. And no one's looking at how to enable people to earn a living when it does. We can't all be skilled (and skilled is gonna be more and more rare as robots and computers do more and more that we used to) and there is only so many unskilled (like picking vegetables, if they don't eventually get robots that do that) jobs to go around. We are going to be forced as a society to deal with that unless it's acceptable for 90% of the population to starve in your book. It's not in mine.

I wasn't saying that the unions should be able to strong arm companies into submission to the extent of being stupidly run as in Pirate Jo's examples but zapf made my point much more clearly than I did. There needs to be some middle ground. Neither should the large companies, reaping their profits from our country, after all, be able to strong arm the workers into submission through unchecked outsourcing or use of criminals (not always illegals btw but literally prisioners in our jails, see motherjones.com) to bypass the minimum wage laws and because workers with rights demand some minimal benefits.

Oh, and if we could all buy affordable health insurance, maybe it could be severed from the job and not be one of those benefits driving up overhead. If we truly want to be market driven and avoid socialism, these are issues we need to address, like it or not. For the free market to truly fairly settle things, the worker too has to be able to negotiate a fair deal to him/herself.

Donna,

Your assertion that technology will replace us all leads me to believe that you've been watching a few too many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

As someone who is actually involved in hi-tech software development, I can assure you that we're a long way off. And there is absolutely no certainty that we'll ever be able to invent an artificial brain that can actually think.

Any credible economist will tell you that the so-called First World is moving in the direction it should, with low skilled jobs getting shifted over to lower cost economies. This forces us to gain more education and reskill ourselves for new, higher-skilled employment opportunities.

Robert,

I wouldn't be caught dead watching one of his movies except maybe Kindergarten Cop.

Did you not read perhaps not in our lifetime? And not yet anyway but things we are achieving weren't even imaginable 50 years ago.

We don't know. And then we'd better educate people who don't otherwise have the means. Unless maybe you do fancy the 90% starvation thing I mentioned?

You did read my post, didn't you?