Meanwhile, in the steel industry, because of the import situation and these high-finance merger and acquisition deals, the average Steelworker is probably happy his paycheck hasn't bounced.
Steel imports are still about 15 million tons higher than they should be and the trend looks to me like it's going up again and has been switched into other steel product lines. This will require a whole new effort.
Then there is the problem of our shrinking customer base, as more manufacturing is shifted out of the USA and to the second and third world. Last year alone the USA lost something like 250,000 or more industrial jobs!
One thing positive about the UAW/Ford computer effort is that it runs counter to this recent revolting development in federal level labor law: http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=PRIV0208&date=08-Feb-2000&word=northwest
Tom
Carl Remick wrote:
> Following is an excerpt from Michael Thomas’s column in the current NY
> Observer. Thomas’s Stars-and-Stripes-Forever ending here is a bit much, but
> I agree that Ford’s decision to give its global workforce Internet access is
> a rara avis for sure – a genuinely enlightened corporate act:
>
> “[Ford’s]
decision to computerize its workers is one of the two truly
> enlightened institutional initiatives of my lifetime. The other was the G.I.
> Bill, whose beneficial effects we continue to feel in this country, even
> after a half-century.
>
> “I think Ford’s decision, once it finds imitators and takes global hold (as
> I have no doubt it will), may prove no less reverberant. Socially and
> financially. It isn’t just the workers, you see, it’s their children who
> will reap the great benefit. Children all around the world.
>
> “How fitting that this remarkable, rich, enlightened, providential gesture
> should be made by the descendants in authority of the first Henry Ford, who
> — way back when — grasped the truth that if he paid his workmen $5 a day,
> they would be able to buy the cars they were building and make him even
> wealthier. And they did.
>
> “What Ford has done epitomizes what Tocqueville meant when he suggested that
> the singular genius of this great nation was for ‘self-interest rightly
> understood.’ Taken all in all, what Ford is doing deserves a Nobel Prize, if
> not for peace, then for something. It makes me proud to be an American.”
>
> But as Thomas’s drum-and-bugle corps fades in the distance, I still have to
> wonder: What’s the catch here?
>
> Carl
>
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