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View Full Version : Sociology Prof's Solution To Detroit Meltdown: Unionize Toyota!



red states rule
12-07-2008, 04:27 AM
As usual, the lefts answwer to any problem is to spread the misery around equally. :laugh2:

Ignore the fact unions have helped destroy Detriot - have unions infest non union shops, and the problem will be solved



The Big Three's real union problem
If there is hope for the Big Three and for the UAW, it rests in unionizing the foreign automakers' U.S. plants.


snip

If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union's utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn't it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized?


As is now clear, when the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat.

Perhaps these accusations seem overly harsh. After all, aren't most of the transplants located in the right-to-work states of the Deep South? Some are, but this hardly explains why the UAW failed to organize the first Honda transplant, located not in Alabama but right in Ohio, the heart of the industrial Midwest.

Is transplant management the difference then? According to the prevailing wisdom, Japanese auto companies neither trust nor understand the American notion of labor unionism. Ah, but there's the rub. The very companies that operate as nonunion transplants in the United States have always confronted a unionized workforce at home, organized by the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation.

The UAW simply never established any sort of alliance with the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation. And yet the UAW leadership knew plenty about Japan and the Japanese labor movement. The leader of the Japanese Automobile Workers Confederation was Ichiro Shioji. As David Halberstam noted in his 1986 book, "The Reckoning," Shioji spent a year at Harvard in 1960 and then spent a summer at the UAW headquarters in Detroit, befriending all the major UAW leaders, including Walter Reuther, Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser. Shioji was no stranger to the UAW.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-cutler6-2008dec06,0,301245.story

5stringJeff
12-07-2008, 03:10 PM
The difference is, Toyota and the other non-Detroit automakers operate mostly in right-to-work states, where unions like the UAW wouldn't last.

red states rule
12-07-2008, 03:11 PM
The difference is, Toyota and the other non-Detroit automakers operate mostly in right-to-work states, where unions like the UAW wouldn't last.

To this idiot, the way to help the auto companies is to use the unions to screw up the competition