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My Dad was in and out of unions during his labor-intensive work life. My late father-in-law was a union activist for 45 years. My ex-wife is a virtual socialist, as is my mom, who in her 80's remembers her father as a pure Russian socialist transplanted to the Bronx. I alone worked the other side of the fence, in a 30-year corporate management career, but my semi-retired native New York heart is still with the working man. Nevertheless, I have to state emphatically that the UAW has got to blink in this standoff, for the sake of their membership and the concentric rings of many hundreds of thousands of workers in feeder businesses dependent on the Big Three.
Anyone inside that union, or for that matter any private sector union still functioning in America, who believes they can return to their mid-2oth century heyday is either suffering from age-related senile dementia or the simple fear-tinged inability to adapt to a changed economic world. The math is on the blackboard. It's apparent the pro-business, anti-labor wing of the GOP is hardening in the South, where "right-to-work" is almost a religion and foreign-owned but American-staffed car companies are already operating in a big way, subsidized by state tax incentives to locate in several southern states.
Corker and his ilk are playing ruthless hardball national politics, and the UAW will emulate the Bush administration in its worst policy wrongheadedness if the union sticks to the self-destructive notion that it doesn't have to compromise on certain issues of overall compensation, in order to save as many jobs as possible in a downsized, "leaner and meaner" industry. The seminal destruction of PATCO by Reagan almost 30 years ago should be a realistic benchmark for their negotiations; they simply no longer possess the political power or influence to buck rational but prudent concessions on certain contract features that render Detroit intrinsically non-competitive with the Japanese, Koreans and Germans operating in the U.S.
In the greand traditions of the American bargaining table, they may wait until the 11th hour to publicly acknowledge this reality and make those concessions, but make them the UAW must, because the alternative is almost incomprehensible...a manufacturing nuclear winter throughout the midwest. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that the current cabal of incompetent and visionless executive bozos that brought the Big Three to their knees walk the plank well ahead of the UAW's sacrifice; if that isn't economic justice in spades, nothing can be.
But the union has to bend, or it WILL break under the weight of it's own hubris and delusional sense of entitlement, in a globalized auto industry and economy that will never return to the Post-WWII bubble.
