You are here: Home » The Good Old US of A » The Economy and Your Money » Break the UAW’s Jaw to Save It

Break the UAW’s Jaw to Save It

Jimmie | December 28, 2008 | Comments (1)

It’s no big leap to say that the UAW is a major cause of the Big Three’s financial problems. Plenty of folks, including me, have focused on the ridiculously generous compensation packages that have the companies paying nearly full health benefits to a rapidly-growing ocean of retirees.

Rand Simberg, though, has focused on something that, to me, is a far more obvious cause: the work rules insisted upon by the unions that have not so much killed innovation and efficiency as they’ve taken them into the alley behind a dumpster, beaten them to death, the violated the corpses. Here’s an good-sized excerpt of his article which you should read in its entirety.

I was in theory responsible for keeping parts flowing through the entire plant. They ran on little slidewalks, like you walk on in airports, far above the floor. There were gates to divert them to the proper lines, and tables where they would congregate and fill when lines were down, like reservoirs with dams. There was a robot that I could command to pull pallets off a rack and replenish the tables. And, as one might imagine, there were lots of things that could go wrong.
A breaker might trip on the robot. A gate might jam, causing the reservoir to fill and the parts line to be depleted, making the workers below unable to complete the assembly of an oil filter. And when these things happened, what was I supposed to do? If a breaker tripped, I was supposed to put in a repair ticket for an electrician. If a gate jammed, I was supposed to put in a ticket for a pipefitter — it may even have been a special subclassification for an assembly-line upper-level pipefitter. If a belt jammed, I was supposed to requisition a machinist, any of whom might be busy on other jobs. Or outside, taking a nap in their van. While waiting for them to arrive, assembly lines, perhaps even the entire plant, would be shut down, costing thousands of dollars a minute with workers sitting around unable to assemble the product.
I was an engineering student who had been tearing down and putting cars back together my whole life. I knew how to turn on a breaker. I knew how to unjam a pneumatic gate. The supervisor and I had an implicit agreement. I would ignore the rules and keep the plant running, and he would let me do whatever I wanted up on the catwalk, by myself. Most of the time I read or studied or even napped, while working sixteen-hour shifts at double time, but keeping one eye on all of the mirrors that showed progress or problems on the parts flow. When something went wrong, I fixed it, instead of putting in the repair ticket. Only once, when I napped a little too long and a line dried up, the supervisor came up and woke me. I still fixed the problem much faster than it would have been fixed had we waited for the skilled tradesman to show up, and he had no problem. As I said, it was a great job and all because of union rules.
But as someone interested in business and free markets, I could also see that this could not go on, when the foreign competition was becoming very appealing. When something can’t go on, eventually it doesn’t. That’s where we are today.
And the rules don’t just affect productivity — they affect quality as well. When you can’t discipline employees for being absent without leave, when you have to bring in unfamiliar workers to fill in for them, when you’re missing half your plant during hunting season — yes, the stories about avoiding buying cars built on Monday or Friday in the fall are true — you can’t expect to put out a quality product, regardless of how well or poorly designed it is. You particularly can’t expect to do so when the union rules put all responsibility for quality and production on management, but give them no authority to manage the workers and provide the workers with no incentive to build a quality product if they lack the personal pride to do so.

Union rules have been a joke for as long as I can remember but now they are no laughing matter. There is no way in the world that any company can be competitive when its personnel regulations weigh more than the average Thanksgiving turkey. Those rules have been slowly bleeding our auto companies to death and the very best the UAW can offer now is a defiant demand that we taxpayers pick up the tab for its greed.

We can’t do it. The UAW has to let go. It if won’t do so willingly, then we’re going to have to insist that a bankruptcy judge break its jaw and pry it off now while there’s still some chance for life. The irony here is that if we break the UAW’s jaw now, it may still be useful for its employees later. If the automakers fail after limping along for another couple of years thanks to our hard-earned cash, it will be mostly the UAW’s fault and the public will want blood. The UAW will not survive that.

(via Jonah Goldberg)

Pin It

Buffer