THANK YOU to the Senate for killing the automaker union bailout.
Yes, union bailout. Unions are mostly behind the domestic auto industry’s failure. They literally killed the “goose that laid the golden egg” by forcing salaries almost 60% more than PhD college professors!
$160K total compensation for repetitive, assembly line work.
This bailout is–literally–leftist Congressmen buying votes from their leftist union friends. A few supposed conservatives jumped on for flaky reasons, including “my district needs a bailout, too”; paranoia of economic apocalypse; and because they fear unionized constituents.
Generations of automaker management have failed to convert their supposed vision into quality products. That’s partly why domestics have made crap cars for decades.
But if vision is currency, unions are the eyeball gougers. When unions guzzle so much revenue, what’s left but scraps? What funds innovation? Management’s #1 fault is playing nice with unions.
Did the Senate kill the union bailout? Perhaps, but, again, the unions caused the failure: they stubbornly refused meaningful compensation concessions. Senate Republicans demanded they drop wages to PhD college professor-levels instead of medical doctor levels. Either way, union members would still be overpaid for turning a screwdriver all day.
I hope this debate causes a colossal shift in union legitimacy.
Unions have their place. I support them when they rise against bona fide workplace abuses.
But when become institutionalized, when their purpose is a monopoly on labor, when they violate our Constitutional right to free association (“closed shop”), unions are a strategic blunder. They shift broad economic focus from what makes the United States special–innovation–and instead try make us like every other gray, socialist or communist country–artificial wage inflation. That’s why domestic automakers are failing–unions converted them from innovators into a socialist jobs program.
It’s time for the auto unions to go. If the foreign automakers’ non-union employees are so highly paid, then domestics can pull it off, too.
One last note: Nancy Pelosi claims we’re playing “Russian roulette” by not bailing out her union buddies. In fact, any Russian roulette is when the bailout debt causes future inflationary pressure.