Tom, are you sure about the foreign factories paying better than UAW? That's sure the first I've heard of that.

That's because you don't keep up with my posts. If you read them all Phoenix University will have you take an online test and mail you a diploma, all for the low low price of $49.95, shipping included.

This one's free:

http://letters.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/12/05/a_really_bad_jobs_report/permalink/123199f1012621eb972dad0198acf96c.html

But once they are here, and dominating the market, how are you going to stop it? Taxpayer subsidies for the losing business model? Some sort of internal tariff?

Easy.

Override the state laws with federal laws to require the foreign transplants to allow their workers to unionize.

Problem solved.

You're nothing but a bunch of Confederate traitors, trying to destroy this country from the inside. You've waited this long for your chance & now you're taking it.

Disgusting filthy stupid Southern traitors!!

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2008/12/11/D950TJS00_congress_autos/index.html

Read it and weep in a Southern accent.

Yes, you raise an interesting solution, and I suppose the union "open ballot" legislation which Mr. Obama favors could get to that in part, although I suspect we would see the American domestic political equivalent of World War III before all those foreign-owned and/or U.S. owned auto and steel firms would put themselves in a position where they could not only be unionized, but dragged "up" to the position of the UAW and similar high end unions.

Of course, doing that would increase costs for the American consumer, and probably decrease the quality of products, on the one hand. On the other hand, many (including me) have worried for years about the race to the bottom internationally, not just with wages, but envirnonmental protections as well.

Short anecdote. I visited the home of President Benjamin Henry Harrison several years ago in Indianapolis -- a long forgotten late 19th century Republican. Little did I know that defending steep tariffs was "the" central platform of the Republican party during that era. Our history books normally treat the tariff as an artifact of the antebellum period (when the South opposed it, and it was deemed to be good) and the Depression era (when it was deemed to be bad). Today, the only tariff proponents I can see on the national scene are Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, and neither one of them appears to be in danger of being drafted into serious political prominence.

So, I would allow that maybe you're right. As I've said in my Sarah Palin defenses (there have been more than one), I have a soft spot for the old guard, business-friendly, civil rights Republicans. (In part, perhaps, because I had a great-great-great grandfather who fought in the western front in the Civil War for an Indiana regiment, ended the conflict in New Orleans to participate in the federal liberation of slaves, and named one of his sons after the abolitionist Republican Charles Sumner). So who knows, maybe you're right about wage and benefit parity, just like the old timers. I think I could live with it, if you were. Still, I don't think I want to subsidize the existing differential, if you're not.

Let's say you're as incredibly well-informed as you say you are. Why are senators -- according to every news source I've been able to check -- demanding that the UAW CUT Detroit's union wages to BRING THEM DOWN to parity with non-union wages paid in the southern states? Arithmetic doesn't work that way. And dammit, you can sound as smug as you want, but I have to believe those senators (yeah, yeah, they're incompetents and crooks, yeah, yeah) have access to the real numbers, i.e. who's being paid what and where.

So, professor, since you feel you've already said everything worth saying on the subject, please point to your post containing the mathematical fudge factor that allows lower wages to be cut in order to equal higher wages.

Or are you just taking the piss out of us?

Why are senators -- according to every news source I've been able to check -- demanding that the UAW CUT Detroit's union wages to BRING THEM DOWN to parity with non-union wages paid in the southern states?

The auto workers of the foreign transplants aren't unionized.

That's why the overseas auto companies build plants in the US: they can escape their own unions. They're in the US for the cheap labor.

The Confederates are asking the UAW to cut down a couple bucks per hour to what the non-union foreign plants pay in the USA.

My previous post was about what the foreign companies pay at home, in Germany and Japan. Walter provided a good source, a New York Times article.

Here's the deal: The Confederates just want to bust the union. That union already has low labor rates, conceded by contract. An instant, late-night reduction of a couple more bucks is not necessary for the North American auto companies to come back. It's a silly excuse for the Confederates to scuttle the deal, and send the USA off the cliff. If it were not this, it would be some other excuse.

I am with slandsma on page 2... It is time to end the "gentleman's agreement" to avoid the actual filibuster process. I'd like to see MacConnell try to reign in the loyalties of his senators if they know that they'll appear on national TV lecturing and dilly-dallying as American industry continues to sink further into the toilet on a daily basis. I have a hard time believing he can pull in 40 others to stand up and put their seats on the line over a move clearly designed to break the back of the last real bastion of American organized labor. It's time to end the super-majority standard for bringing bills to the floor and make these obstructionists put up or shut up in the public eye.

I suspect we would see the American domestic political equivalent of World War III before all those foreign-owned and/or U.S. owned auto and steel firms would put themselves in a position where they could not only be unionized, but dragged "up" to the position of the UAW and similar high end unions.

That's how nearly all unions were established in the first place, all over the world. They were practically slave revolts.

Try googling "union history" if you're really interested.

Modern US and European worker pay is as high as it is, and working conditions made tolerable, essentially because people died (for your paycheck) a hundred years ago and more.

Unions are expected to be forced to collapse eventually, one way or another, and that will be the end of the US middle class. Employment dynamics being what they are, the unions are basically all that prevent US corporations from turning the US into a third-world country. Even though they represent only about 10% of US workers, the unions effectively put upward pressure on all wages by forcing most employers to pay to compete for preferred workers.