Stop Blaming the Auto Workers

Stop Blaming the Auto Workers by Jim Ramelis

As the Big 3 American Auto Manufacturers come on bended knee to Washington to beg for bailout money, it seems quite the fashion to bash the auto worker for the car manufacturer’s problems. Right wingers from Mitt Romney to Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox and CNBC can be counted on to spew venom toward the American worker. They try to spin it as if the workers caused all this mess that the auto makers are in. Michigan voters need to remember just where Mitt Romney stood when we needed him and who he attacked when he comes to Michigan looking for votes in 2012.

We are told again and again that to be competitive the Auto companies must do something about the pensions, wages, and benefits of the workers. The Auto companies are scolded for trying to honor the promises that were made to their workers over the years. What are these wise pundits proposing? Are they encouraging the car companies to kick millions of retired auto workers off their health insurance? What about their pensions, are they to go to the pension fund backup that the government runs, where the pension holder gets a percentage of their pension, and of course we tax payers pay for it?

Was it the Auto workers decision to continue to make gas guzzling pigs as gasoline prices soared? No it was management’s decisions. America’s losing globalization strategy, including NAFTA, wasn’t the decision of the worker, either. It was the decision of overpaid executives and politicians.

The auto workers wages aren’t as fantastic as they are made out to be either. The non-skilled labor force makes about $28 an hour, has health insurance, vacation time, sick time, and a retirement plan that includes a pension. That is not party time wages. It is a good solid middle class living. Is that so bad? They have worked in what has traditionally been a high profit intensive industry and they have been rewarded with good contracts. As of late, the U.A.W. has given huge concessions up to help their mismanaged companies. A new worker is only going to start at about $14 an hour. When Fox News, for instance, gives the wages of the auto worker, they add the hourly wage, benefit package, Social Security, unemployment compensation deduction, health insurance, retiree costs etc., pad it some and then give a fantastic sum of $75 an hour or so and make it sound as if that is what the worker is actually getting an hour. How many of us have our companies retiree health costs added to our wage and benefit package when numbers are being crunched? What an unfair distortion of reality.

Meantime the critics just skim over the incredible executive salaries and bonuses of those at the top. It is their stupidity and mismanagement that got the car companies to the point they are at. The workers do as they are told. They just make the cars. Some media folks seemed to notice as the executives pulled into Washington in their private jets, with as Nancy Pelosi said “their tin cups in hand”, ready for bailout money from the tax payers. Notice the first thing the Republican leadership went after was the working man and woman. The UAW not agreeing to immediate concession was the deal buster preventing aid to the auto companies. Nothing was said about executives going to parity with foreign car companies or giving American workers large bonuses that companies like Toyota give their workers. The Senators from Alabama, representatives of foreign car makers in their state, are leading the charge to destroy the American worker and plunge the United States into a depression. It is this sort of short sighted leadership that has got us into the economic position we are in today. If the Big 3 American auto makers go under, millions and millions more Americans are going to lose their jobs as the economic ripple effect goes through the land. We won’t be buying Toyotas and Mercedes either, Senator Shelby. Everything for these guys is top down and the lesson that as goes the American worker so goes America as been lost on them. For Senators like Shelby of Alabama and Corker of Tennessee, who are leading the charge against the American worker, it is all about beating the working class down and pumping up corporate powers. How far down does America have to go before these lames realize that if the American worker doesn’t have any money, he can’t buy things and the economy dies.

This country has steadily gone downhill in the last several years as politics and a failed ideology trumped good sense and patriotism. Turning down the auto companies for help based on failed union busting efforts is just another example of that. And that is all the latest turn down of the auto companies is, an attempt at union busting. Disaster capitalism has taught those planning turning the land of the free and the home of the brave into corporate headquarters for the international corporation, that the time to strike is when there is disaster and confusion. When New Orleans was drowning, that was a great time to privatize as much as possible and trash public education with charter schools. Now it is to heck with America, this is a great time to do some union busting. The downfall of most demagogues, extremist religious fundamentalist movements, and tyrannical political regimes such as the Nazis and the Communists is that ideological purity comes before pragmatism and reality. Pushing the ideology first is always paramount for the devotee and when the ideology no longer works, or as in this case, never worked to begin with, disaster and collapse, as we see now happens.

The Democrats are intelligently demanding some accountability from the auto companies. I am glad they want to know exactly how taxpayer’s money is going to be spent. We have a culture of unchecked greed that permeates the corporate world and we saw evidence of it when the news of bailout money for the financial sector hit Wall Street. Immediately the slippery executives started to party, and take care of old number one. Our political leaders would be foolish to give these selfish greed driven bunglers, who have caused this financial mess, tax payers money to squander also. Accountability must be paramount. This culture of greed and selfishness is what drives the reasoning of those who want to turn their backs on the auto companies and let America drown once again.

The auto industry does need to be helped, though and I am not saying that just because I am from Michigan. The economic spin off effect of two or all three of the Big 3 auto makers going down the tubes would be too much for the fragile economy to bear. It would be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. We would no longer be talking recession, we would be talking depression. Yes, help the auto companies, but demand accountability, and get off the worker’s backs.

Jim Ramelis is co-chair of the Mackinac County Democratic party, a Fellow of the Michigan Progressive Leadership Fellowship, a Featured Blogger on Crossleft.org, a website for Progressive Christians, and was a grass roots organizer for the Obama campaign this fall.