Tom Lehman wrote:
> Dear Doug and the Left Buysiness Observers,
>It's always easy to blame the union leadership, and, that's the easy way
>out that a lot of people take when the pressure is on!!!
>
>I know you to be a very smart and righteous gentleman---now is the time
>for you to get involved with your union leadership in Detroit. Give your
>union a call and ask them what you can do to help out.
Tom, you've got to be kidding. The UAW is closed and undemocratic even by the low standards of U.S. unionism. They have no militance, no vision, no strategy. They've done nothing to prepare the members or the public for this strike - contrast this with what the Teamsters did in advance of the UPS strike - and have been unable to articulate any way in which they're fighting for the broad interests of the U.S. working class. They've had 9 strikes over the last few years, but all local, with no national strategy.
Nathan Newman wrote:
>Maybe my math is worse that yours, but by your numbers, there is
>potentially $64,000 per worker available with a GDP of $8 trillion. Even
>in your numbers, there is $30.80 in hourly GDP per worker, so even with
>costs of materials (which is usually mostly other peoples' labor
>downstream), why is it so inconceivable to move much more of the
>population from the low wages they are currently paid?
That's a different question. There's certainly enough money around to boost the wages of bedpan cleaners and childcare workers (in the technical sense - leaving aside the political implications of it all for now). If workers were paid every penny of the GDP they produce, though, you'd have to shave off a big share to cover investment and depreciation. No matter how you bend the numbers, it's just impossible to pay every U.S. worker a UAW wage.
>I would also note that, as I expected, the $44 per hour number you
>initially cited is almost double the real average hourly rate for most
>autoworkers.
So the Wall Street guy was picking the highest number he could, and you're picking the lowest. The truth is somewhere in between. Autoworkers have been putting in an average of 6-7 hours of overtime a week, which at time-and-a-half is $33/hr. Add to that some very substantial fringe benefits and you're well above $30. But even at $22, you're still talking more than ten times the wage of a Mexican autoworker. And these are jobs, which, while stressful, boring, and dangerous, don't require tremendous amounts of skill.
>And for that, I will defend those bourgois salaries those autoworkers are
>making.
[and]
>"When won't they be able to find another worker somewhere in the world they
>can hire to work for less? Once you accept their logic, you buy into the
>never-ending cycle of playing worker and worker, whether across borders,
>union v. non-union, right-to-work states v. non-RTW (for less) states,
>native-born v. immigrants, men v. women, old v. young, even one UAW local
>against another within the same company. The only significant difference is
>at what pace you will run the 'race to the bottom.'"
The point isn't that the race to the bottom shouldn't be resisted, and that one shouldn't defend the "bourgois" salaries the autoworkers are making. The point is how you defend and resist. I got a private email from someone who also went on about the dividends, the share buybacks, the ad spending, and all the other money that GM lavishes on its shareholders and promoters. Well no kidding. It's the capitalist organization of production. Between 1987 and 1997, GM ranked 291 in total return to investors in the Fortune 500. Ford was 233 and Chrysler, 195. It's also the worst of the 3, and generally in the bottom half, of profits on revenues and assets. GM has plenty of cash and can weather a long strike. You could imagine GM signing some vague deal with the UAW promising to consider this & that, and then continuing to outsource and speedup. (The UAW has had almost nothing to say about speedup and management by stress. Standard doctrine is that autoworkers should be productive for 57 seconds of every post-Fordist minute, compared with 45 seconds in Taylorite days.)
Nicholas Lobaccaro, an auto analyst at Merrill Lynch, is quoted in today's New York Times as saying "I want to be able to sleep at night knowing that G.M. can downsize without having a strike." On the 24th the Times had him saying "There's been tremendous pressure on parts pricing. To compete in the global economy, you need labor to be paid commensurate with value added. And you can't pay $46 an hour to do wire harnesses." This is intense class struggle, and the capitalists are better armed than the UAW, which is waving the American flag, of all things.
Doug