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> Does anyone really think corporate anti-union talking points are in their workers' best interest? Yes, usually at least half the workforce. But but but the

• treeman79 3y ago
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  • imachine1980_ 3y ago
    Car companies left cities not Detroit, the cost of labor was high but also thw cost of the space
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • birdyrooster 3y ago
    This completely ignores globalization and the fact it was geopolitics that took the jobs away.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • willcipriano 3y ago
      The unions were instrumental in getting the people pushing globalism elected.
      • birdyrooster 3y ago
        Hardly. Labor Unions were against immigration and globalization and demanded tariffs to protect US industries. Chavez was prolific in his anti-immigration arguments. It was the capital holders who pushed globalization, outsourcing and mass immigration.
      • bugglebeetle 3y ago
        The two flavors of US political parties were both right wing, neoliberal globalists. Clinton allying with Republicans to pass NAFTA is clear evidence of this. Only recently have they also both postured away from this stance, largely in response to the new Cold War with China.
        • dragonwriter 3y ago
          > The two flavors of US political parties were both right wing, neoliberal globalists. There were significant (but not always dominant) factions of that type in each party during the period of ideologically incoherent parties in the period of the long post-Depression realignment, and overlapping the very end of that period there was the brief neoliberal consensus period from the late 1980s into the 1990s.
  • rqtwteye 3y ago
    Gotta love how people blame lack of a company's success on those bad workers. How about actually doing the unimaginable and build decent cars? Almost every time I get a rental from a US car company I am reminded that they don't seem to care about building good cars. They just throw a bunch of options together and make the car bigger. Nobody seems to actually try the car and see if it drives well.
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Separate issues. Yes American car designs sucked, but they were moving production to Mexico either way. It's not like they closed all the detorit plants because they didn't have any money, they just wanted to make more.
    • linksnapzz 3y ago
      It takes two to tango. The problem with industrial unions in the US is not so much the salary and benefits paid to one, or even to a set, of individual workers. It's the demands by the union to maximize union membership (and dues) that make it impossible to take advantage of improving efficiency (which could lead to fewer employees). The story I've heard...was that steelmaking in the US went into decline after WWII, because US mills weren't destroyed in the war. USX, Bethlehem et al. kept making steel using inefficient prewar methods, with equivalent staffing costs. Foreign (ex-Axis) steelmakers invested in brand-new, more efficient methods to replace what had been bombed, and these new mills gave them a cost advantage. So why didn't the US mills upgrade? Because their contracts with the union more or less made sure that no matter how many fewer staff it would take to run, the number of United Ironworkers members on the payroll would never decrease. It wasn't worth the capital cost to upgrade in the '50s-'6s, and by the '80s, when it would've been, it was too late. There was a possibility, if the unions were a bit more farsighted, to accept a gradual drawdown in staffing, and consolidation of job definitions by attrition, with no real loss of individual wages or benefits. But that never happened. A similar dynamic occurred in the auto industry...labor (and the UAW is a bad, bad, bad, union for this) was very short-sighted, and Detroit purchased peace with them at a very high cost in terms of productivity per worker; partly because they had the money to, partly because it was seen as a necessary evil, and partly because the idea of being more efficient in operations was seen as intractable-they didn't listen to Deming when he first started to talk about it.
  • wahnfrieden 3y ago
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