Uaw Says Its Full Of Fight - Road to the Middle Class

YOU’VE gotta hand it to the UAW. They’re not ready to roll over and play dead. Why, the whole idea of bankruptcy is absurd, a management trick, as Tom Krisher reports from the UAW bargaining convention.

(By the way, Tom does not tell his readers whether he is a union member. It is the official position of us here at Road to the Middle Class that all journalists should disclose their union membership status when writing about labor unions. Anyone that doesn’t isn’t really a journalism professional. Disclosure: Nobody at Road to the Middle Class is a union member.)

Martin Shawl, 53, a 28-year Delphi Corp. and General Motors Corp. worker from Bay City, said he doesn’t believe the Detroit automakers are in financial trouble.

"It’s voodoo accounting," he said, questioning the timing of the Chrysler Group’s losses and GM’s restatement of earnings due to accounting troubles

He said the union shouldn’t give back anything to the companies, and it should end a two-tier wage scale that pays new hires less than longtime workers.

God bless the fellow! It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to exploit the working stiffs on the shop floor and to force give-backs.

Tell you what, Marty, old chum. I just checked the financial box scores today. General Motors is capitalized at about $18 billion. Google is worth about $144 billion.

Now I don’t know what kind of voodoo goes into the pricing of common stock on the global finance markets. Probably there is a fair amount—dead chicken, entrails, the whole Haitian thing.

But when General Motors is worth about 12 percent of upstart Google it has to mean something beyond smoke and mirrors. Old sport.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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