The People's Weekly World is "partisan to the working class, racially and nationally oppressed peoples, women, youth, seniors, international solidarity, Marxism and socialism" and "enjoy[s] a special relationship with the Communist Party USA, founded in 1919, and publish[s] its news and views." Right, so, the paper says "many thousands" of UAW workers don't believe the numbers being touted by the automakers to justify labor concessions. Citing GM's plan to invest $6m into Daewoo and Ford spending over a billion dollars on a plant in Eastern Europe, they're certain the companies are much better off financially than they let on. They're particularly suspicious of GM, claiming "during contract negotiations it is likely it will hide more than half its profits." Admitting they don't know what's going on in the negotiations, they feel "the union can be expected to raise both the issue of concealed corporate profits and the issue of nonlabor costs of making vehicles." So now you know.
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So I guess that means that the folks inside of the Communist newspaper are not GM stockholders…
So I guess no profit should go towards improving product or facilities or growing new business… it all has to go to the workers. Sounds great, you know, unless you have to actually compete to sell product.
I also don’t understand the point of the caption. Is he referring to Diamler bailing on him? Is he saying that Chrysler owes him an overpaid low-skill job despite them moving back to the USA?
Oh, and is Eastern Europe still prodominanty Marxist/Socialist? If so PWW is complaining about Ford building a plant and creating jobs for socialists?
Are the lads digging in for the long haul? It’s a very good question though,
‘…GM’s plan to invest $6m into Daewoo and Ford spending over a billion dollars on a plant in Eastern Europe…”, how can they ask the UAW for major wage and benefit concesssions while spending money like this and to add insult to injury from the union standpoint it’s an overseas investment. I dunno, maybe Rick has us all fooled!
@Mellvar: “Oh, and is Eastern Europe still prodominanty Marxist/Socialist?”
You’re kidding, right?
I have to say, I agree with the UAW. Also, Mr Rabid Rick will have a bitch of a time negiotating concessions from the UAW when GM declared a $891 million in profits for the last quarter.
Stick by your guns, Mr Gettlefinger! Make ’em squeal like a piggy!
I also don’t understand the point of the caption. Is he referring to Diamler bailing on him? Is he saying that Chrysler owes him an overpaid low-skill job despite them moving back to the USA?
From what I gather from the article, he’s referring to the possiblity of GM et al filing for bankruptcy and walking away from financial obligations.
It’s interesting the article takes GM and Ford to task for spending money overseas (where the majority of their money is made nowadays) and says nothing about the billions Chrysler is spending to build and expand plants in the US where the UAW will benefit.
I don’t understand about this whole Union/Management thing. If I made a contract to pay for a house, I would be responsible for it whether or not my income goes up or down. Paying for commitments to retirees seems to be the same thing. GM, Ford and Chrysler agreed to these things, now they don’t want to pay because their profits are down. That is not right…Big 3 pay your bills just like every other American does.
Lock them out for a while, soon they will realize that the economy is in a nose dive.
All this blabber is lobbying for public sympathy.
Bush may have a dismal 24% approval rating, but congress has a 3%
Same with GM and the UAW
Oh, by all means, the UAW membership should make ’em squeal like pigs, do it until it hurts. After all, it’s the last chance they’ll get to feel important. In a few years it’ll be nothing but…want fries with that?
What do they believe? That violence and coercion will make them wealthy? They must get that from watching TV.
Being a communist now is like being a member of the flat earth society. It demonstrates utter ignorance, denying the lessons learned from the past.
“I don’t understand about this whole Union/Management thing. If I made a contract to pay for a house, I would be responsible for it whether or not my income goes up or down. Paying for commitments to retirees seems to be the same thing. GM, Ford and Chrysler agreed to these things, now they don’t want to pay because their profits are down. That is not right…Big 3 pay your bills just like every other American does.”
Except they can’t shell out that much money on healthcare costs and be competitive with their transplant competition at the same time.
The answer is universal healthcare, but the Big 2.8 don’t have that kind of clout.
It’s not like health care costs have been rising since these committments were made… they’ve been skyrocketing. How could GM (decades ago) have suspected that not only would it’s workers live 20 years after retirement, but that during that time they would regularly avail themselves of the most advanced, most expensive, and most elaborately billed health and medical care the world has ever known? Something has to give, and retiree health insurance coverage is falling faster than the price of viagra. As the quotient of uninsured rises, we will have to move to a more universal system of coverage. Until then, good luck to the union labor force squeezing whatever they can from management.
The article states that GM is investing 6 billion, not million, in Daewoo.
jabdalmalik:
Universal health care may be the answer but the only way you will have it without it being a huge taxpayer ripoff is to take the insurance companies, mega health corporations and ambulance chasing lawyers out of the equation.
It will never happen because they own all the politicians.
Yup. The poor little 2.8 don’t stand a chance.
It’s quite curious that there are still people who profess to be Communists. One would think Marxism’s 100% wretched historical record would bring them to their senses. Apparently they, like the White Queen, can believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Of course, some impossible things have quite a following. For example, the belief that “universal health care” is the answer to GM’s problems. Apart from the fact that GM and/or its employees (who else?) will have to pay for any UHC plan that’s implemented, there is another really big obstacle. We don’t want to give up what we have.
Today I chatted with two guys I hadn’t seen for 2 or 3 years. One told me he recently went to a hospital with chest pains. Next day, they put two stents in him. The other guy went to a doctor and learned his liver was totally shot. In three days he got a transplant.
Remember: Cheap, Fast, Good – choose any TWO. There’s no way to get around that. In the US, health care is expensive, but fast and good. Do you think either of those guys would choose to wait 90 days for live-saving treatment so they could cut their health care expenses?
The answer for GM (and Ford and Chrysler) is to sell cars at a profit, and a lot more of them. If Scrooge McDuck paid for all health care benefits, Detroit would still be in trouble, just not quite as deeply.
Oh pffft. It’s perfectly within our reach to offer everyone in the country high-quality healthcare cheaply and quickly. Don’t hide behind tired aphorisms and meaningless anecdotes – they’ve got no place when we’re debating the best automobiles, much less the best ways to safeguard people’s lives.
It’s ludicrous to claim that universal healthcare wouldn’t help the Big 2.8: corporations only pay taxes on profit anyway, and even then at a much lower rate, meaning that the rest of society would in effect be shouldering the responsibility of paying for what are today Detroit’s healthcare liabilities.
The facts line up entirely in a single-payer system’s favor. It’s cheaper, that’s for sure: America spends drastically more per capita on healthcare than any other country on Earth. The reasons are well-documented, and include the wonders of preventative medicine (only feasible when everyone is insured) and the horrible conduct of private insurance providers.
Universal healthcare is also more effective. Americans are more likely to die from any of a myriad number of preventable diseases than our counterparts in France and elsewhere. The areas where the US system is superior largely consist of specialty treatments that few outside of the über-rich are ever likely to benefit from.
The speed boogieman barely even warrants rebuttal. Lifesaving treatment is not put on hold due to waitlists in the vast majority of single-payer systems. In SOME countries (and only some) elective treatment takes longer to schedule – but that’s misleading, because in the US there are 50 million people who simply don’t have that option open to them at all.
Corporate Americas profits are down, along with the Big Automakers, not because of union wages, pensions, or benifits ( health Ins. etc ). It is becauce they give away Millions in wages and Millions in Bonuses to fat cat money grabbing CEOs. Take the Corporation I work for, I cannot mention their name, last quarter the gave the Company President a 39 Million Dollar bonus. While we are at the bargaining table hearing them say that they cannot afford to give us a measly 15% pay raise covering a 4 year period.
It seems to me that if all these Companies are having such a hard time financially, they would not be throwing all that money around at the top.
Anyway, that is the way I see it.
wstansfi: “How could GM (decades ago) have suspected that not only would it’s workers live 20 years after retirement, but that during that time they would regularly avail themselves of the most advanced, most expensive, and most elaborately billed health and medical care the world has ever known?”
Walter Reuther was pushing for national health coverage in the early 1960’s after concluding that it was economically unsound to place the burden on manufacturers. Time has proven him and many others correct. Somehow “poorer” countries like Canada, England, France, Germany and Italy manage to provide national health coverage without bankrupting their governments; each still has good roads, bridges, education, policemen, firemen, libraries and a standing military. A significant percentage of our health care dollars go to overhead and to a medical establishment which in lieu of preventing fires, learns how to make hoses nearly everywhere as the fire has become all consuming. Another significant percentage of health care dollars go to people in the last six months of life and to infants unlikely to survive. Just as no father would choose to bankrupt his family, leaving them penniless in order to add three months to his life, so too do we as a nation need to understand how to best apportion our limited medical resources.
Nonetheless, it is curious how, with more money spent per capita than any other country on earth, The U.S. ranks 42nd in infant mortality rates. We are also 42nd in life expectancy. It’s hard to admit, but maybe some other countries have figured this out better than we have.
I don’t understand about this whole Union/Management thing. If I made a contract to pay for a house, I would be responsible for it whether or not my income goes up or down. Paying for commitments to retirees seems to be the same thing. GM, Ford and Chrysler agreed to these things, now they don’t want to pay because their profits are down. That is not right…Big 3 pay your bills just like every other American does.
I agree. They should have set aside money at the time of the promise. However, they decided to bet on future revenue. They lost. I think the union is just as much to blame here. When they accepted future benefits, they should have considered the possibility that the company may not be there in the future. They should have then demanded cash on the barrelhead so they could invest for future benefits.
jabdalmalik universal healthcare may help the former big three but to claim it would be high quality and could be done cheaply and quickly is far fetched.
All one has to do is look at Canada and England.
The problem is that the former big three have an outstanding healthcare coverage for the retirees whose cost is either entirely or the great majority paid for by the companies.
They (the retirees) don’t want to pay for this benefit, and they don’t want to be switched over to medicare, which is our national health care coverage for seniors.
Of course they don’t want medicare because it is inferior coverage to what they have and it does not pay 100 percent, but somehow we are led to believe that this “nationl health care plan” will save the former big three. The fact is an national plan will be greatly inferior to what the UAW retirees currently have.
My father died last year at 91, he paid 200 dollars a month for a medicare supplement that paid for virtually anything that medicare didn’t.
We simply need people to pay for the services they want.
“jabdalmalik universal healthcare may help the former big three but to claim it would be high quality and could be done cheaply and quickly is far fetched.
All one has to do is look at Canada and England. ”
Go look at Canada and England. Hell, go look at France and Germany and Switzerland and Norway while you’re at it. By almost any measurable metric their healthcare systems are superior to our own.
“We simply need people to pay for the services they want.”
So what you’re saying is that only the rich need to have healthcare.
Sure, look at Canada and the U.K., and for that matter, every industrialized nation on earth except the U.S. Let’s compare them and see who lives longer. (U.S is down to number 42 or so).
Here, we have capitalism for patients, and socialism for the insurance companies. How is what we have in this country anything like a free market? Can I go on Ebay and buy a blood test? An eye exam? an MRI? No. Prices are set by non-transparent means between providers and insurance companies. And if you don’t have insurance, you can pay ten times as much, or more for the same service.
With TB, SARS, Mad Cow, West Nile and various other epidemics, we are supposed to have faith that infected people with get the heath care they need before they spread the infection and impact the economy. I don’t think we can count on that. So, in the end, we’ll pay our tax money to keep people in quarantine instead of giving them vaccines.
Our blind adherence to philosophy over practicality, public health and basic economics, will cost us. It is easy to blame union workers for living too long, or having health care benefits, or for getting hurt on the job. Would you just jump at the chance to buy a car from a company that advertises how they don’t provide any health or retirement benefits for their workers? Why not just buy cars made by inmates? But how can you also blame the car makers for re-locating to countries, such as Canada, that have universal health insurance?
OK! Im Canadian we have universal Health care.Its like socialism in general. It don’t work!
I don’t believe in discussing religion or politics.So thats the begining and the end of my input to this post.
mikey my point is those who advocate universal healthcare on america want to retain the level of service of the best health care plans in the current system and make them available to all. That is not what Canada and England have.
The best healthcare plan in the current system is having a metric fuckton of cash. That level of service will never be available to everyone, and no one is pretending otherwise.
Mikey said:
“OK! Im Canadian we have universal Health care.Its like socialism in general. It don’t work!
I don’t believe in discussing religion or politics.So thats the begining and the end of my input to this post.”
Mikey, are you a hit and run debater?
Hate to say it, but the older I get and the longer I work in “Corporate America” as a white collar professional, the more sympathy I have for the union guys.
I’ve worked in accounting at a number of corporations, and I see the kind of stock options (repriced if the stock goes down), perks, reimbursements, etc. that upper management gives themselves. It has been that way at ever large company I’ve worked for. They take away pensions, bonuses, fringe benefits etc. for the white collar and blue collar guys, but they get huge perks for themselves.
The real issue is Corporate America has absolutely no allegience to anything than to Upper Management and Wall Street – everybody else (workers, customers, communities where they exist, nations, etc.) comes in a very distant last place. Most places I’ve worked would fire all their employees in a heartbeat if they could make more by employing Communist Chinese – let the next generation worry about confronting a wealthy, militarily aggressive Chinese.
That is the reality, but striking will win them nothing but unemployment.
taxman100: “Hate to say it, but the older I get and the longer I work in “Corporate America” as a white collar professional, the more sympathy I have for the union guys”
How and when did it become fashionable to have no sympathy or even disdain for a union guy?