Wow! We could have written that headline at the beginning of this mess. Unions seem to take great delight in standing in the way of reform that could possibly save their jobs. Remember when the airline pilot's unions killed Eastern Airlines?
All the unions had to do in order to get the Republicans to go for this $15 billion bailout was to promise to reduce union wages to the level paid to automakers in the Toyota and Nissan plants by the end of 2009. No way. They weren't going for it. So now GM has hired bankruptcy council.
GM is in a better financial situation than the government that wants to bail it out. The only difference between these two failing entities (GM and the government) is that the government can print the money. GM can't.
So where does this lead us? DeMint says that if a bailout passes we are going to see riots: "We're going to have riots. There are already people rioting because they're losing their jobs when everybody else is being bailed out. The fairness of it becomes more and more evident as we go along. The auto companies may be hurting ... but there are very few companies that aren't hurting and they're going to hurt. We don't have enough money to bail everyone out." He's absolutely right .. we don't have the money. Government politicians who are drunk with power think that they will be able to bailout the people that support their power. This auto bailout is no exception.
That leads us to the unions. For months, politicians have been creeping around the real source of this auto bailout: the unions. They know the UAW is the problem but they are too afraid to say it. Why? Because of exactly what I said before: power. But Jim DeMint says, "The primary driver behind this is the unions, because bankruptcy allows the auto companies to basically restructure all their contracts in a way that a bankruptcy judge says will make them sustainable ... And if they do that, then essentially the unions lose all their leverage. It's the unions that have brought them to the brink. So definitely, I think the reason they want a political solution and a car czar is because a car czar can protect the unions through this whole process at the expense of the taxpayer." Makes sense ... so why did the UAW stand in the way of this $15 billion? I'll tell you why. Because they know they can get the full deal as soon as the Democrats take over, without any strong wage concessions. They're betting that GM doesn't pull the bankruptcy lever before PEBO gets sworn in.
Seed Newsvine
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