The Flint sit-down strike of 1936/37

Eric Loomis, in another of his important series on the history of the labor movement in the U.S., notes that yesterday marked the anniversary of what is arguably the most important date in union history.  I won't excerpt any of it because the whole thing...you know.

"Either way we lose"

The Globe's biggest union votes no -- barely -- to take a pay cut. Now the litigation begins.

Anti-populist populism

Nothing -- not even a woman in a persistent vegetative state -- seems to get Republicans so energized as the possibility of workers choosing to join a union. Obviously, it's a rare opportunity for their interests and the interests of the Chamber of Commerce to converge, and it doesn't require the input of those vaguely icky religious nuts they generally rely on to supply "the passion."

It is a key opportunity for Democrats to build a box with which to enclose the GOP. Thwarting workers attempt to achieve a middle class lifestyle, while at the same time screaming about Obama's plan to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, makes for a nice visual of Republicans working at the bidding of their corporate overlords to maintain our record levels of income disparity.

Talk about a "culture war."

Democracy and the Employee Free Choice Act

One of the central talking points you are going to hear as the Senate begins debating the highly contentious EFCA, is that it will "destroy democracy," since it allows union certification without "a secret ballot." Dean Baker sets this straight.

Okay, let's see if we can teach the Wall Street Journal something this morning. In an article reporting on the prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act in the Senate the WSJ told readers that: "the bill would allow unions to organize workers without a secret ballot, giving employees the power to organize by simply signing cards agreeing to join."

Wrong! The current law already allows workers to organize by majority sign-up. They can also have a union de-certified by majority sign-up. The difference is that under current law it is the employer's option to accept majority sign-up or to demand an NLRB election. Employers who wish to prevent unionization can demand an election. They can then delay the actual election for several years. They can use time to require workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions. They can also fire the key organizers, thereby undermining the organizing drive and intimidating workers.

The main change in the law under the Employee Free Choice Act is that workers, not employers, would decide the method for union certification. The WSJ should be able to get this one right.

One would expect the WSJ editorial pages to spread this, not the paper's news reporters. But then, the bullshit surrounding this issue is pretty deep.

It's like being a NASCAR sponsor...

...except in this case it's the race to the bottom. And Toyota, Honda, and Nissan are abetted in their efforts to lower US auto workers' wages by -- you betcha -- Southern Republican Senators (that description is redundant isn't it?).

When one compares how the auto industry and the financial sector are being treated by Congress, the double standard is staggering. In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Hundreds of billions were given to the financial-services industry with barely a question about compensation; the auto bailout, however, was sunk on this issue alone.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger realized that the existence of the union was under attack, which is why he refused to give in to the Senate Republicans' demands that the UAW make further concessions. I say "further" because the union has already conceded a lot. Its 2007 contract introduced a two-tier contract to pay new hires $15 an hour (instead of $28) with no defined pension plan and dramatic cuts to their health insurance. In addition, the UAW agreed that healthcare benefits for existing retirees would be transferred from the auto companies to an independent trust. With the transferring of the healthcare costs, the labor cost gap between the Big Three and the foreign transplants will be almost eliminated by the end of the current contracts.

These concessions go some distance toward leveling the playing field (retiree costs are still a factor for the Big Three). But what the foreign car companies want is to level -- which is to say, wipe out -- the union. They currently discourage their workforce from organizing by paying wages comparable to the Big Three's UAW contracts. In fact, Toyota's per-hour wages are actually above UAW wages.

However, an internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to "tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry." Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota's $30-an-hour wage.

So, it seems that McConnell, Shelby, Cocker, et al., were acting on behalf of their constituents when they poison pilled the bridge loan legislation last week. Those constituents being Japanese automakers. Cause they sure ain't workers in the states they represent.

Via Tapped.

If the story about Toyota's losses on All Things Considered this afternoon is any indication, then one positive about this is the debunking -- albeit slowly -- of the myth that UAW workers make twice as much as auto workers in southern Japanese company plants and that payroll costs are anything but a tiny part of the cost of a car.

$73 an hour

David Leonhardt actually explains where this number came from and why it's misleading.

Let’s start with the numbers. The $73-an-hour figure comes from the car companies themselves. As part of their public relations strategy during labor negotiations, the companies put out various charts and reports explaining what they paid their workers. Wall Street analysts have done similar calculations.

The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn’t made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word “compensation.” It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That’s why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don’t show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It’s a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda’s or Toyota’s (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn’t mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It’s a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You’d never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the “$73/hour” pay of Detroit’s workers with the “up to $48/hour” pay of workers at the Japanese companies.

These retirees make up arguably Detroit’s best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.

It's the unions' fault

According to the Post, anyway.

"There are givers and there are takers"

Paul Lemmon of the AFL-CIO eloquently explains what it means for the country that unions have lost concentration of membership and therefore political power. He's a powerful advocate.

Whether by coincidence or design, the decline of industrial unions has neatly coincided with the decline of a middle class...with the decline in confidence for many Americans that if they do their job they'll have a job to do, and if they get sick it won't mean (ever more elusive) bankruptcy.

But Ezra slips around an important point. When I was growing up in the late 70s unions like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO were still powerful, but were easy scapegoats for a country that was seeing the decline of the America's industrial power. That image -- of sleazy, corrupt union leadership that cared more about its members' dues than its members was hammered in to us relentlessly, and was believable because even union members themselves knew their leadership to often be just that. But as far as I can tell, McArdle's a kid*. If, as Ezra suggests, she thinks of union leadership that way, where does that come from?

*UPDATE: Apparently that assertion is flat wrong.

Working class heroes

For the United Auto Workers.

Workers unite!

As a committed progressive, how can I not support the strike? But, um, I don't think a scarcity of cars is gonna be a problem for GM for quite some time.