The Western Kentucky Worker
Official Newsletter of the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO
Prepared by Berry Craig, AFT-Kentucky and KEA-NEA
Volume 10, Number 1, January, 2009
Union haters don’t let facts get in the way of their union-bashing
By BERRY CRAIG
The union-haters are claiming the “greedy” United Auto Workers derailed the federal bailout for financially-strapped Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
Of course, union haters never let facts stand in the way of their labor-bashing.
The UAW has made concessions, big-time. A group of fiercely anti-union Republican senators used the union’s stand against more concessions as a pretext to scuttle the $15 billion aid package the House passed.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the other Republicans who blocked the bailout bill must have figured they were in a win-win situation. If the UAW knuckled under to their demands for more concessions, the union would be weakened. If the union refused, McConnell and company would have an excuse to nix the bailout and blame the “selfish” UAW.
Not coincidentally, several of the senators who opposed the bailout are from Southern right-to-work states that are home to foreign-owned, non-union auto plants. According to the Associated Press, Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW’s international president, suggested that the bailout-busting lawmakers “thought perhaps they could have a twofer here maybe: Pierce the heart of organized labor while representing foreign brands.”
It didn’t surprise Jeff Wiggins that McConnell opposed the bailout. “Mitch despises unions at the gut-level,” said Wiggins, a Steelworker and member of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO
Executive Board. “He never misses a chance to hammer unions. He’s willing to destroy the American auto industry to destroy the UAW.”
Border state Kentucky isn’t a right-to-work state. “To get around that, McConnell favors a national right-to-work law,” said Wiggins, who is also president of the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, which is headquartered in Paducah.
Meanwhile, conservative pundits – who have had little to cheer about since the election – have declared open season on the UAW. But even supposedly objective news reporting “is all about how the greedy auto workers and their unions refused to accept the oh-so-reasonable compromise proposed by Senate Republicans that would require them to quickly drop their wages and benefits to match those of foreign-owned plants,” wrote Daphne Eviatar on the Washington Independent Internet website.
She added: “None of the mainstream news coverage I’ve seen – whether in the New York Times, Washington Post or CBS news – mentions the fact that Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and his fellow Republicans are from the same Southern states where those foreign companies own and operate auto plants – none of which are unionized, and all of which provide lower wages and fewer benefits than the Big Three.”
Eviatar is right. What’s also interesting – but almost never makes the news – is the fact that foreign auto manufacturers who have non-union plants in the U.S. have unionized plants back home.
Eviatar also pointed out that while the Republican “free enterprisers” oppose federal aid to unionized Detroit automakers, they see no problem in luring non-union foreign plants to their neck of the woods with generous state subsidies. (Toyota got almost $150 million in tax breaks and other goodies financed by Kentucky taxpayers to open a plant in Georgetown.)
McConnell and his Southern Republican soul-mates also are fond of wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes – some of them the Confederate Stars and Bars, too -- and portraying themselves as true patriots. Yet, as Eviatar aptly observed, they are glad to “represent their foreign car corporation constituents” and “are eager to break the [American] auto workers union – now.”
She also wrote that workers at non-union, foreign-owned car plants make fairly close to what union workers make at American car plants. Thus, a lot of the Southern non-union workers think they don’t need a union. (No doubt McConnell and his sidekicks hoped if they could equalize union and non-union pay and benefits by coercing the UAW to make more concessions, Northern auto workers might think they didn’t need a union either.)
But Eviatar added that it’s UAW-won wages that fatten non-union auto plant worker paychecks. If foreign-owned plant owners paid their workers a lot less than American plant owners pay their union workers, the non-union workers might -- you guessed it – join the UAW.
If the UAW went away, the wages of every car plant worker would sink like the Titanic. “That would make Mitch very happy,” Wiggins said.
Meanwhile, the UAW has made significant concessions to the U.S. auto makers. “…In 2005 the UAW agreed to reopen the contracts mid-term and accepted cuts in workers’ wages and health care benefits for retirees,” Gettelfinger told the U.S. House of Representatives. “Then in the general 2007 collective bargaining negotiations, the UAW agreed to what industry analysts have called a ‘transformational’ contract that fundamentally altered labor costs for the Detroit-based auto companies.”
He added that “as a result of all these painful concessions, the gap in labor costs that had previously existed between the Detroit-based auto companies and the foreign transplant operations will be largely or completely eliminated by the end of the contracts. Indeed, one industry analyst has indicated that labor costs for the Detroit-based auto companies will actually be lower than those for Toyota’s U.S. operations.”
Maybe McConnell’s friends at Toyota will give him an especially nice present this Yuletide. Bless his heart, Mitch’s dobber has been down since Nov. 4.
Kentucky voters almost retired him. While his presidential candidate – another right-wing,
pro-right-to-work Republican senator -- carried Kentucky, he lost the election. At the same time, the Democrats increased their House and Senate majorities.
But that’s not all that’s curdling Mitch’s eggnog. His wife, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, will soon be unemployed.
“We had hoped to ditch Mitch,” Wiggins said ruefully. “But at least his wife, the anti-labor labor secretary, will be out of a job when Barack Obama is sworn in.”
-- Berry Craig, who lives in Mayfield, is a professor of history at the Western Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the newsletter editor. He is a member of the American Federation of Teachers and the Kentucky Education Association-National Education Association. He is also on the area council executive board.
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Here is the true tale of the ‘Mitch Who Stole Christmas’
The only items the Grinch stole from the good folks of Whoville were some jingtinglers trumtookas and gardookas, along with their roast beast. But the Mitch who tried to steal Christmas from the autoworkers and their families was after a lot more serious loot—like health care, wages and their union cards.
In a new online campaign, “The Mitch Who Stole Christmas,” the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (http://www.calnurses.org/) says it’s time to tell Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that according to our list, all he gets for Christmas is a lump of coal. McConnell is one of the leading anti-worker lawmakers who killed an emergency loan
to keep afloat the nation’s automakers, along with more than 3 million U.S. jobs.
CNA/NNOC Co-President Geri Jenkins, RN, says McConnell may have been after UAW members and their union this time, but tomorrow it will be other working people’s wages and benefits.
The campaign (click http://ga1.org/campaign/mitch) invites people to send a message to McConnell, and sign up for public protests and other actions to protect America’s working families.
CNA/NNOC’s Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro says McConnell and the other Republicans who scuttled the help for carmakers and workers were motivated by their hate for unions. As we’ve reported, an
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gopcars12-2008dec12,0,4564430.story e-mail message
circulated among Senate Republicans declared that denying the auto industry a loan was an opportunity for Republicans to “take their first shot against organized labor.”
Says DeMoro:
The voices of labor will not be silenced. Not about our jobs, our healthcare, our respect, our dignity….These types of attacks on the working people who built this country are disgraceful all year but especially during the holidays. And, not surprisingly, his actions directly led to at least temporary layoffs for thousands of workers. Sen. McConnell can now add another title to his resume: The Mitch Who Stole Christmas.
While the Grinch returned the jingtinglers, roast beast and the rest, we shouldn’t wait for McConnell’s “two-sizes too small” heart to swell three sizes as the Grinch’s did when he saw the light. No, it’s likely, McConnell will remain, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss:
a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich, with arsenic sauce.
A message from Motown for Mitch and his anti-union buddies.
By MITCH ALBOM
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
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Hey, you senators: thanks for nothing.
Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: You’ll go down with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but you surely tried to kill it.
You have blood.
Kill the car, kill the country. History will show that when <<America>> was on its knees, a handful of lawmakers tried to cut off its feet. And blame the workers. How suddenly did the workers — a small percentage of a car’s cost — become justification for crushing an industry?
And when did Detroit become the symbol of economic dysfunction? Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately, Washington?
In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that YOU failed to regulate, how on earth do WE need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms, why do WE need to be schooled on how to run a business?
Who is more dysfunctional in business than YOU? Who blows more money? Who wastes more trillions on favors, payback and pork?
At least in the auto industry, if folks don’t like what you make, they don’t have to buy it. In government, even your worst mistakes, we have to live with.
And now Detroit should die with this?
In bed with the foreign automakers
Kill the car, kill the country. Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Bob Corker, Sen. Mitch McConnell, your names will not be forgotten. It’s amazing how you pretend to speak for <<America>> when you are only watching out for your political party, which would love to cripple unions, and your states, which house foreign auto plants.
Corker, you’ve got Nissan there and Volkswagen coming. Shelby, you’ve got Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and — like McConnell — Toyota. Oh, don’t kid yourself. They didn’t come because you earned their business, a subject on which you enjoy lecturing the Detroit Three. No, they came because you threw billions in state tax breaks to lure them.
And now you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?
They cut their salaries.
Or they resign in shame.
When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over a failed policy?
Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?
Who are you people?
More money for the lords of Wall Street
There ought to be a law — against the hypocrisy our government has demonstrated. The speed with which wheelbarrows of money were dumped on Wall Street versus the slow noose hung on the auto companies’ necks is reprehensible. Some of those same banks we bailed out are now saying they won’t extend credit to auto dealers. Wasn’t that why we gave them the money? To loosen credit?
Where’s your tight grip on those funds, senators? Where’s your micromanaging of the wages in banking? Or do you just enjoy having your hands around blue-collared throats?
No matter what the president does, history will not forget this: At our nation’s most uncertain hour, you senators stood ready to plunge hundreds of thousands of American families into oblivion. Leave them unemployed, with no health care, on public assistance. And you were willing to put our nation’s security at risk — by squashing the manufacturing base we must have in times of war.
And why? So you could stand on some phony principle? Crush a union? Play to your base? How is our nation better off today now that you kept $14 billion in the treasury? Are you going to balance the budget with that?
Don’t make us laugh.
Kill the car, kill the country. You tried to slam a stake into our chest; you don’t realize how close you are to the nation’s heart. Shame on your pettiness. Shame on your hypocrisy. This is how lawmakers behave two weeks before Christmas? Honestly. What has become of this country?
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or mailto:malbom@freepress.com.
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‘Without organized labor we would still be living in the days of…Hoover…’
UAW Retiree C. Jay Latham wonders how any U.S. senator can “look down on the middle class in this country and complain that they are making to much money.”
He meant Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and the other Southern Republican senators – Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell among them -- who torpedoed the federal bailout for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
“You are the only people that I know of that give yourselves big raises every year while refusing to do anything about the minimum wage,” added Latham, who lives near Benton. “You set up your own retirement, your own insurance that the taxpayers pay for.
“I might say your benefits are the best money can buy. I think your wages should be voted on by the people.” You should pay into Social Security and draw it like everyone else, you should draw Medicare along with everyone else.”
Many of the Republicans who voted to scuttle the government aid package are from states that have non-union foreign-owned auto plants. “Just remember all the foreign car makers you have in Tennessee and the South, their money or their profits go back to foreign countries,” he said. “You should remember that organized labor is what made this country, the great country that it is today.”
He added, “Without organized labor we would still be living in the days of Herbert Hoover, but again you can't remember those days when coal was two dollars a ton but there was no one who had two dollars. Yes I can remember the last of those days.”
He wonders why Corker “isn’t smart enough to know if everyone had a good paying job the economy would take care of itself.” He concluded, “I live just live across the line in Kentucky, raised on a farm we never killed off our cows to multiply our herd. That is exactly what we are doing when we send our good paying jobs to third world countries for the cheap child labor and forced labor. We will become a third world country and that is exactly where we are headed and that is what our ancestors will have to compete with.”
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I promise to get more involved in the council’ is a good New Year’s resolution
By JEFF WIGGINS
Council President
I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas. But we’ve all got to pull together if we are to have a Happy New Year at the council.
Attendance got pretty skimpy at monthly meetings toward the end of 2008. I am grateful to those of you who are the faithful few.
But I am sorry to see so many empty chairs when I gavel our meetings into session. It wasn’t always so.
Not that long ago, there was hardly a seat available for monthly meetings – especially when candidates came seeking our help. They knew our support was important to their election.
I’d hate to think the time might come when politicians don’t call on us. That time might come if we don’t start filling up the chairs when the politicians do visit us.
Politicians go where the votes are. They stay away from where there are no votes.
Because 2009 isn’t an election year, we probably won’t see many politicians. But that doesn’t mean nothing important is going to happen at the council or that a good crowd isn’t needed.
Early in the year, we will be electing officers from the president on down. We will also be seeking nominations for the W.C. Young Award, the highest honor the council bestows.
We will also be making plans for the annual W.C. Young Dinner and our Workers’ Memorial Day Observance, both set for April.
So get involved. Get other people in your union involved. Bring friends and neighbors and family members. Let’s fill up those seats like we used to do.
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A letter to the editor from a West Virginia Ford dealer
Editor:
As I watch the coverage of the fate of the U.S. auto industry, one alarming and frustrating fact hits me right between the eyes. The fate of our nation's economic survival is in the hands of some congressmen who are completely out of touch and act without knowledge of an industry that affects almost every person in our nation. The same lack of knowledge is shared with many journalists whom are irresponsible when influencing the opinion of millions of viewers.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama has doomed the industry, calling it a dinosaur. No Mr. Shelby, you are the dinosaur, with ideas stuck in the '70s, '80s and '90s. You and the uninformed journalist and senators that hold onto myths that are not relevant in today's world.
When you say that the Big Three build vehicles nobody wants to buy, you must have overlooked that GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the U.S. and Ford outsold Honda by 850,000 and Nissan by 1.2 million in the U.S. GM was the world's No. 1 automaker beating Toyota by 3,000 units.
When you claim inferior quality comes from the Big Three, did you realize that Chevy makes the Malibu and Ford makes the Fusion that were both rated over the Camry and Accord by J.D. Power independent survey on initial quality? Did you bother to read the Consumer Report that rated Ford on par with good Japanese automakers.
Did you realize Big Three's gas guzzlers include the 33 mpg Malibu that beats the Accord? And for '09 Ford introduces the Hybrid Fusion whose 39 mpg is the best midsize, beating the Camry Hybrid. Ford's Focus beats the Corolla and Chevy's Cobalt beats the Civic.
When you ask how many times we are going to bail them out you must be referring to 1980. The only Big Three bailout was Chrysler, who paid back $1 billion, plus interest. GM and Ford have never received government aid.
When you criticize the Big Three for building so many pickups, surely you've noticed the attempts Toyota and Nissan have made spending billions to try to get a piece of that pie. Perhaps it bothers you that for 31 straight years Ford's F-Series has been the best selling vehicle. Ford and GM have dominated this market and when you see the new '09 F-150 you'll agree this won't change soon.
Did you realize that both GM and Ford offer more hybrid models than Nissan or Honda? Between 2005 and 2007, Ford alone has invested more than $22 billion in research and development of technologies such as Eco Boost, flex fuel, clean diesel, hybrids, plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars.
It's 2008 and the quality of the vehicles coming out of Detroit is once again the best in the world.
Perhaps Sen. Shelby isn't really that blind. Maybe he realizes the quality shift to American. Maybe it's the fact that his state of Alabama has given so much to land factories from Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes Benz that he is more concerned about their continued growth than he is about the people of our country. Sen. Shelby's disdain for "government subsidies" is very hypocritical. In the early '90s he was the driving force behind a $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Plus, Alabama agreed to purchase 2,500 vehicles from Mercedes. While the bridge loan the Big Three is requesting will be paid back, Alabama’s $180,000-plus per job was pure incentive. Sen. Shelby, not only are you out of touch, you are a self-serving hypocrite, who is prepared to ruin our nation because of lack of knowledge and lack of due diligence in making your
opinions and decisions.
After 9/11, the Detroit Three and Harley Davidson gave $40 million-plus emergency vehicles to the recovery efforts. What was given to the 9/11 relief effort by the Asian and European Auto Manufactures? $0 Nada. Zip!
We live in a world of free trade, world economy and we have not been able to produce products as cost efficiently. While the governments of other auto producing nations subsidize their automakers, our government may be ready to force its demise. While our automakers have paid union wages, benefits and legacy debt, our Asian competitors employ cheap labor. We are at an extreme disadvantage in production cost. Although many UAW concessions begin in 2010, many lawmakers think it's not enough.
Some point the blame to corporate management. I would like to speak of Ford Motor Co. The company has streamlined by reducing our workforce by 51,000 since 2005, closing 17 plants and cutting expenses. Product and future product is excellent and the company is focused on one Ford. This is a company poised for success. Ford product quality and corporate management have improved light years since the nightmare of Jacques Nasser. Thank you Alan Mulally and the best auto company management team in the business.
The financial collapse caused by the secondary mortgage fiasco and the greed of Wall Street has led to a $700 billion bailout of the industry that created the problem. AIG spent nearly $1 million on three company excursions to lavish resorts and hunting destinations. Paulson is saying no to $250 billion foreclosure relief and the whole thing is a mess. So when the Big Three ask for 4 percent of that of the $700 billion, $25 billion to save the country's largest industry, there is obviously oppositions. But does it make sense to reward the culprits of the problem with $700 billion unconditionally, and ignore the victims?
As a Ford dealer, I feel our portion of the $25 billion will never be touched and is not necessary. Ford currently has $29 billion of liquidity. However, the effect of a bankruptcy by GM will hurt the suppliers we all do business with. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy by any manufacture would cost retirees their health care and retirements. Chances are GM would recover from Chapter 11 with a better business plan with much less expense. So who foots the bill if GM or all three go Chapter 11? All that extra health care, unemployment, loss of tax base and some forgiven debt goes back to the taxpayer, us. With no chance of repayment, this would be much worse than a loan with the intent of repayment.
So while it is debatable whether a loan or Chapter 11 is better for the Big Three, a $25 billion loan is definitely better for the taxpayers and the economy of our country.
So I'll end where I began on the quality of the products of Detroit. Before you, Mr. or Ms. Journalist continue to misinform the American public and turn them against one of the great industries that helped build this nation, I must ask you one question. Before you, Mr. or Madam Congressman vote to end health care and retirement benefits for 1 million retirees, eliminate 2.5 million of our nation's jobs, lose the technology that will lead us in the future and create an economic disaster including hundreds of billions of tax dollars lost, I ask this question not in the rhetorical sense. I ask it in the sincere, literal way. Can you tell me, have you driven a Ford lately?
Jim Jackson
Elkins Fordland
Elkins, W. Va.
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