The UAW built America’s middle class, the GOP is destroying it

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Harold Myerson is among the most thoughtful and knowledgeable opinion writers at the Washington Post. (Unfortunately,the mythical "liberal" media tends to promote only the Post's syndicated columnists and right-wing ideological flaks David Broder, George Will, Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer. Note to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow: add Harold Myerson to your regular guest list alongside the Post's Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne, Jr.)

Myerson wrote a column several days ago that was spot on about the history of the UAW and the rise of the middle class in post-war America, a middle class under assault from GOP economic policies since the early 1970's. Harold Meyerson – The United Auto Workers as the Architect of U.S. Prosperity ("Destroying What The UAW Built").

Myerson's first point is that the UAW has always been far more visionary than the auto companies and their out-of-touch corporate executives.

In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction. Titled "A Small Car Named Desire," the pamphlet suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently.

The pamphlet's author was the research department of the United Auto Workers.

By the standards of the postwar UAW, there was nothing exceptional about "A Small Car Named Desire." In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution — not just the most farsighted union — in America. "We are the architects of America's future," Reuther told the delegates at the union's 1947 convention, where his supporters won control of what was already the nation's leading union.

Myerson's second point is that the UAW served as a model for the union movement which built the middle class in post-war America by improving the wages, benefits and working conditions for all Americans, union and non-union workers alike.

At the end of the war, [Reuther] led a strike at GM with a set of demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM's board.

That proved to be a bridge too far. Instead, by the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.

The inability of the UAW to put union and public representatives on the boards of The Big Three proved to be significant, however. Without these interested stakeholders at the table, the insular corporate culture of The Big Three made a series of short-term profit driven decisions over the next several decades that are largely responsible for the situation in which The Big Three finds itself today. The insular corporate culture of The Big Three does not do the long-term "vision thing" to maintain its position as a successful venture. They should have listened to the UAW which has a vital stake in maintaining the continued success of The Big Three.

Finally, Myerson discusses the broader contributions that the UAW has made to progressive movements in America, which helps to explain why conservatives have such disdain for the UAW.

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez's fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early '60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther's death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care — a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today — which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

It is this conservative ideological hatred for the UAW which explains the GOP's myopic opposition to a bridge loan to The Big Three. (If these were non-union plants, you can be certain there would not have been any GOP opposition).

Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that the Republican right hates the UAW so much that it would prefer to plunge the nation into a depression rather than craft a bridge loan that doesn't single out the auto industry's unionized workers for punishment. (As manufacturing consultant Michael Wessel pointed out, no Republican demanded that Big Three executives have their pay permanently reduced to the relatively spartan levels of Japanese auto executives' pay.) Today, setting the terms of that loan has become the final task of the Bush presidency, which puts the auto workers in the unenviable position of depending, if not on the kindness of strangers, then on the impartiality of the most partisan president of modern times.

Republicans complain that labor costs at the Big Three are out of line with those at the non-union transplant factories in the South, factories that Southern governors have subsidized with billions of taxpayer dollars. But the UAW has already agreed to concessions bringing its members' wages to near-Southern levels, and labor costs already comprise less than 10 percent of the cost of a new car. (On Wall Street, employee compensation at the seven largest financial firms in 2007 constituted 60 percent of the firms' expenses, yet reducing overall employee compensation wasn't an issue in the financial bailout.)

In a narrow sense, what the Republicans are proposing would gut the benefits of roughly a million retirees. In a broad sense, they want to destroy the institution that did more than any other to raise American living standards, and they want to do it by using the power of government to lower American living standards — in the middle of the most severe recession since the 1930s. The auto workers deserve better, and so does the nation they did so much to build.

New York Times opinion writer Bob Herbert has described the GOP's labor policy as A Race to the Bottom. 

In testimony before the U.S. Senate this month, the president of the United Auto Workers, Ron Gettelfinger, listed some of the sacrifices his members have already made to try and keep the American auto industry viable.

Last year, before the economy went into free fall and before any talk of a government rescue, the autoworkers agreed to a 50 percent cut in wages for new workers at the Big Three, reducing starting pay to a little more than $14 an hour.

That is a development that the society should mourn. The U.A.W. had traditionally been a union through which workers could march into the middle class. Now the march is in the other direction.

Mr. Gettelfinger noted that his members “have not received any base wage increase since 2005 at G.M. and Ford, and since 2006 at Chrysler.”

Some 150,000 jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have vanished outright through downsizing over the past five years. And … the autoworkers are prepared to make further sacrifices as required, as long as they are reasonably fair and part of a shared effort with other sectors of the society.

"The economic downturn, however severe, should not be used as an excuse to send American workers on a race to the bottom, where previously middle-class occupations take a sweatshop’s approach to pay and benefits."

Leo Gerard at Campaign for America's Future elaborates on this race to the bottom in his blog piece Toyota Republicans Should Cut Their Own Pay:

The Toyota Republicans are all for helping the rich with tax breaks and shelters, and they’re all for aiding foreign auto manufacturers with billions worth of tax forgiveness and government-paid infrastructure improvements.

But their disdain for the working class couldn’t be clearer as they organized defeat of loans to the Big Three under this command: “Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor.”

* * *

Clearly the allegiance of the 31 Republicans who opposed the loan to save GM and Chrysler is not with the United States of America, which would lose 900,000 jobs if just GM closed, and more than 2.1 million if the Big Three did. Those job losses would occur during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In November, the 11th consecutive month of job losses, another 533,000 people were thrown out of work, swelling the pool of unemployed to 10.3 million. The Toyota Republicans were willing to increase that.

They voted against the interests of their own states as well. Consider what would happen in a few of those Southern States whose senators led the charge against preserving the Big Three. If just GM collapsed, Kentucky would lose 20,000 jobs; Alabama, 21,000; Georgia, 23,000, and Tennessee, 29,400, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute.

* * *

[T]he Toyota Republicans opposed federal money for American companies but supported state and federal money for foreign auto makers estimated at $3.6 billion.

* * *

It’s clear that the real problem was not a philosophical one. All of these lawmakers were willing to flick free market capitalism out the car window like a cigarette butt if their states could use taxpayer dollars to buy a foreign auto plant. No, what really gags them about the Big Three is that they pay good, middle class wages and benefits as a result of contracts with the United Autoworkers.

Repeatedly, the Toyota Republicans insisted that UAW members bear the brunt of the cost of the bailout. The senators insisted that UAW wages be lowered to match those of non-union auto workers at foreign-owned manufacturers.

* * *

The Toyota Republicans then conferred the American auto industry to bankruptcy. They said they favored bankruptcy because it would enable the Big Three to break pledges made in labor contracts and promises for health care and pensions made to retirees. The Toyota Republicans want the wages of American workers pulled down. To them, UAW members making an average of $28 an hour, accounting for less than 10 percent of the cost of a car, are earning just too much money.

The Toyota Republicans did not, however, make that claim about the white collar workers on Wall Street who got this country into the financial fiasco that led to the dire circumstances for automakers.

* * *

When those Toyota Republicans voted in favor of providing $700 billion for Wall Street — including both of Tennessee’s senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander; Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell; Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson; South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, and Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn — none asked for high-paid white collar workers to take pay cuts or give up their million dollar bonuses. There was a feeble attempt to limit the pay of chief executives, but that applied only to firms that received federal money under one particular method, and the treasury decided not to hand out the $700 billion that way.

And no lawmaker asked white collar workers or executives who got billions in bonuses based on false profits to return them.

But those Toyota Republicans want middle class, blue collar workers who don’t get year end bonuses, who don’t celebrate with five-figure dinners, to take wage cuts. They want autoworker pensioners to lose the monthly benefits they earned with a lifetime of labor.

And at no time did those Toyota Republicans suggest that they should cut their own salary or top-notch, government-paid health benefits or pensions. Like the reckless speculators on Wall Street, Congress bears responsibility for the crisis condition of the American economy because it deregulated financial markets.

These anti-American, anti-blue collar middle class Republicans comprise a rogues gallery of members of Congress who are a threat to America's workers and our economy. In another age these Southern  insurrectionists would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town.