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SEPTEMBER 21, 2023
On the Prospect website
* Ryan Cooper on the White House's correct decision to let House
Republicans stew
in their own juice
* Gabrielle Gurley on how Jackson's chronic water crisis
is a non-issue in Mississippi's upcoming state elections
* David Dayen on how Amazon now pockets 45 cents of every dollar
its non-Amazon sellers make on the company's website
Meyerson on TAP
The Punditocracy vs. the UAW
Commentators argue that the union is asking for too much. But a big win
may help the UAW organize the non-union competition.
Yesterday, what we might politely term the non-labor wing of the
Democratic punditocracy weighed in on the UAW strike against GM, Ford,
and Stellantis. They didn't like it.
To be sure, both
**Washington Post**columnist
Catherine Rampell and investment banker and Obama 2009 auto bailout czar
Steven Rattner, writing
in
**The New York Times**, acknowledged that the union's wage demands
were basically just, and that Big Three companies should have long since
mitigated some of the concessions (like the creation of a lower-paid
tier of workers) that the union agreed to make when the companies faced
bankruptcy in 2009. They conceded that the gap between the companies'
CEO pay and median worker pay had risen to obscene levels, and, in sum,
that the workers had every right to be very angry at their employers,
who'd been making record profits in recent years.
And yet, both charged that the union was asking for way too much, such
as the restoration of the yearly cost-of-living adjustments and
defined-benefit pensions that the UAW, under Walter Reuther's
leadership, had won in 1950. The problem, they said, was that actions
like these would render the Big Three woefully uncompetitive with the
non-union auto plants in the South, the low-wage auto plants in Mexico,
and Elon Musk's non-union Tesla factory in California and battery
factory in Nevada.
The psychopathically anti-union
**Wall Street Journal**went further than that yesterday, with two
articles
comparing the productivity and cost of American workers unfavorably to
the productivity and cost of workers (and robots) in East Asia, most
particularly in China. As the
**Journal**was the leading editorial voice demanding that the U.S.
establish permanent normal trade relations with China back in the 1990s,
the fact that the U.S.-China wage differential is an issue at all should
really be laid at the
**Journal**'s door. Causing this problem wasn't bad enough,
apparently; now they have the chutzpah to bemoan it.
But the complaint common to all these arguments is accurate
**as far as it goes**. It's indisputable that adopting even just some
of the wage and benefit proposals the union is putting forth will widen
the current gap between, say, what GM workers make, and the life that
enables them to live, and what Tesla workers make, and the life that
compels them to endure. The question is whether the contracts the UAW
will win will lead to the rest of the industry leveling wages and
working conditions up, or whether the labor standards in China, Alabama,
and Elonland will level wages and working conditions down. The
combination of a big UAW win and the new organizing rules promulgated by
the National Labor Relations Board might just enable the union to
organize some of those lower-wage plants, or at least compel them to
raise wages and benefits to fend off the union's campaigns.
I should add that the complaint that the UAW's proposals could lead to
the companies' shortchanging investments in innovation and such might
be received a tad less skeptically had the complainants also bemoaned
the series of stock buybacks that the top executives at GM and Ford have
repeatedly authorized, thereby shortchanging investments in innovation
and such in favor of boosting the value of the shares with which they
themselves are paid. Over the past decade, GM
has bought back $14.8
billion of its own shares, and Ford
, $3.4 billion.
And while we're on the subject of double standards, I note that the
Justice Department is now investigating Tesla for what the
**Journal**terms
****"Tesla's use of company resources on a secret project that was
described internally as a house for Musk." Coincidentally, one of the
recent past presidents of the UAW secretly directed union funds to build
himself a house. Not only did he end up doing hard time, but the Justice
Department compelled the UAW to elect its new officers by a vote of the
rank and file, which led to the election of Shawn Fain and his reformer
regime. It would be nice to think that a similar administering of
justice awaits Tesla and Musk.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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Biden Has the Right Idea About the Freedom Caucus
The White House says there should be no negotiating over an oncoming
government shutdown. BY RYAN COOPER
Amazon's $185 Billion Pay-to-Play System
A new report shows that Amazon now takes 45 percent of all third-party
sales on its website, part of the company's goal to become a monopoly
gatekeeper for economic transactions. BY DAVID DAYEN
Jackson Out of Sight as Mississippi Goes to the Polls
The state's water crisis hasn't fully abated, but nobody's talking
about it on the campaign trail. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
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