Posted by
AuVox on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 6:00:08 PM
An email from Tom:
Let me get this straight...
The American Auto industry has finally gotten their quality up to par with Japanese and German cars made in Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio...
But Chrysler and GM are on life support, with Ford not far behind.
Why?
Over the decades, Management was too afraid to seriously challenge their bloated, ever-increasing Union wage & benefit contracts. (And they knew full well this was coming. Almost a decade ago, a GM Executive remarked that, "We're not a car company anymore. We're a Wage, Health & Retirement Benefits Plan, that makes cars on the side.")
These contracts created $50,000-a-year janitors...
...protected workers that routinely came back from lunch so drunk or high on drugs they passed out on the assembly line, but could not be fired...
...and rewarded High School dropouts with retirement at 55, with full pay and medical benefits for life... even if they got another full-time job the next day.
This madness saddled U.S. car companies with nearly $3000 - PER CAR - in additional costs that other companies that build equivalent cars here in the U.S. do not have to bear.
Now Chrysler is declaring bankruptcy, which would normally allow them to void the Union contracts, and start from scratch with new, reasonable wages & benefits packages, or even go non-union entirely.
But no. In swoops the Obamessiah, with his "approved" rescue plan... which gives 55% of Chrysler to...
The UAW.
That's right, the United Auto Workers Union will have CONTROLLING INTEREST in Chrysler.
Just how exactly does management renegotiate contracts with the majority stakeholder of the company?
How do Chrysler negotiators "hang tough" when the "other side" is also Chrysler's single largest stockholder?...and as such, can order the Board of Directors to fire the negotiators and accept whatever deal the UAW demands?
It's not just putting the Fox in CHARGE of the Hen house, it's signing over the DEED to the Hen House.
It's as if CVS, Walgreen and Rite-Aid were going bankrupt, and the plan to save them includes putting a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in charge and hoping they don't go straight for the Vicodin.
If this happens, Chrysler is D.O.A.
The only question is how many more tens of billions in taxpayer money we'll pump into the corpse before we pull the sheet over.