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Just like the UAW, bank robbers usually want to keep their ill-got gains, even after the police have caught them red handed. Of course, the police, courts and the robbed banks have a different idea about where those illegal proceeds belong.
The spy tries to kill the witness before he is exposed. The magician uses a pretty girl to distract from his slight of hand. The fog (or an artificial smokescreen) is used by the convoy to escape the hunter submarines. The frightened gorilla throws huge amounts of dirt in the air to hide his escape.
All of these ploys (and many more like them) are used to avoid the moment of truth, rather than face it head on. They are also used to gain the upper hand, or to retain it beyond when you rightly should be passing the lead onto others.
While there was great animosity between them, and neither side trusted the other, the Detroit 3 and the UAW appeased each other with union contracts with lucrative wages and benefits, year after year.
If the hourly workers were making X% more, of course management was fully justified in rewarding their side with equal treasures, and even more.
In effect, there was collusion between the Detroit 3's management and the UAW.
There were other stakeholders who were severely affected, but had no say in these "sweetheart" deals among the antagonists. One stakeholder who was used and abused by this collusion and conspiratorial deals was the customer. Who was protecting the customer's interest?
With great hypocrisy, before during and after each contract negotiation, both sides waved the American flag, and claimed to represent and defend the interests of God, windows & orphans, the consumer, and the American people in general. Yeah, right!
Left to fend for themselves, a few brave customers protected themselves the only way they had left. They left the oligopoly owned by the Detroit 3, and went shopping for something else with a lower price, better quality, and more features.
Once a path through the deep, dark forest had been blazed by the frustrated consumer pioneers, that path away from the Detroit 3 and leading to the foreign auto makers soon became an 8-lane super highway full of defectors traveling at top speed towards a warm welcome.
The management of Detroit 3 and the UAW were locked into a costly wage death spiral, neither one willing to stop. They would let outside circumstance control the wage death spiral they had jointly created. Those outside forces and event may now be here.
Both parties knew the risks of their dysfunctional, folie a deux behaviour. As with most obsessive-compulsive behaviours, mentally ill patients are unable to control their behaviours, no matter how crazy they know their actions to be. They just can't stop themselves. Family, friends, and the medical community have to stop them, and get them the treatment they need.
For the Detroit 3 and the UAW, who should have acted as the family, friends, and medical community? To me, it seems natural that government should have played that role.
It wasn't that the government was unaware. Numerous media, consumer advocates, industry insiders, and the public in general knew these actions by the UAW and Detroit 3 would not end nicely. They knew for more than 20 years. They were reminded repeatedly. Little or no effective action was taken by anybody to intervene in this craziness.
Well, here we are, traveling at 100 mph just feet away from a head-on crash into an economic brick wall. Nice job! Thanks!
What should have happened more than 30 years ago?
Karl Marx defined "surplus value" as the economic engine of capitalism. To tie wages and benefits to anything else risks the decoupling or evaporation of the net surplus value at some uncertain future.
As an example, Toyota provides its N. American workers with a basic, guaranteed wage. In addition, numerous bonuses can be earned by the workers for improvements in safety, quality, environment, productivity, and a host of other important issues. No results, no bonus. Achieve the reasonable goals, and you get your bonus.
Secondly, the Japanese re-taught the current generations of Americans what previous generations of Americans had taught the Japanese: "You're only as good as your last improvement."
The Japanese word Kaizen (continuous improvement) expresses this as a cultural imperative. This means no matter how good you are today, you can always get better tomorrow.
No matter how far behind you are today, you will eventually catch your opponent if you accelerate (ie. improve) faster than they do. Once you are in the lead, your control your own destiny. As long as you continue your continuous improvement program, nobody can catch you, you will always be in the lead. Only if you stop or slow down your rate of improvement as compared to your competitors, will you lose. In other words, your competitors can't cause a win, but you can cause yourself to lose.
In 2005, I did a study (available for free at http://info.pqa ) on the automotive industry and world-class manufacturers. This study demonstrated that high rates of improvement can be achieved, as high as 7.65% per year, every year, for more than 10 years. That's 2,090% improvement in productivity over a 10 year period.
If the Detroit 3 and UAW had worked more co-operatively, with this shared vision, there would have been plenty of riches for all.
Instead, we now have a fight to the death by millions of scrawny rats; each claiming ownership of the few remaining crumbs from a wasteful, hedonistic banquet that ended long ago.
Would the Detroit 3 be in their current mess if they had achieved even a fraction of this world-class improvement rate that other manufacturing sectors have proven to be possible? I don't think so.
So what do we do now?
We wait for capitulation, or a bankruptcy, or an agreement by these deranged psychopaths to get treatment. Under previous rulings of the US Supreme Court, all union contracts are subject to re-negotiation or unilateral imposition of sanity by the courts. Alternatively, perhaps the "Car Czar" is just the ticket. Hopefully, both the Detroit 3 and the UAW agree to the imposition of binding arbitration by the Car Czar to set them straight, avoiding the need for a messy bankruptcy.
Hopefully, the Car Czar closes the circle so that this generation of bickering Americans can learn from their American forefathers (just as the Japanese did decades before), that everything comes from improved operations, elimination of waste, making every decision as a steward for the customer, and looking forward three generations into the future.
Every penny of wages and benefits, beyond the basic minimum wage, needs to be earned each and every day by real improvements. There is no free lunch, nor instant pudding. That's why they call it work.
... Ron Gettelfinger, head of the United Auto Workers union, knows that worker packages, which cost carmakers $74 an hour in wages and benefits, are way out of line with deflationary reality. But most of Gettelfinger’s proposals aren’t about slashing those packages. Instead, Gettelfinger is emphasizing plans for federal assistance to manufacturers, or federal cash to improve terms of auto loans. ...
The spy tries to kill the witness before he is exposed. The magician uses a pretty girl to distract from his slight of hand. The fog (or an artificial smokescreen) is used by the convoy to escape the hunter submarines. The frightened gorilla throws huge amounts of dirt in the air to hide his escape.
All of these ploys (and many more like them) are used to avoid the moment of truth, rather than face it head on. They are also used to gain the upper hand, or to retain it beyond when you rightly should be passing the lead onto others.
While there was great animosity between them, and neither side trusted the other, the Detroit 3 and the UAW appeased each other with union contracts with lucrative wages and benefits, year after year.
If the hourly workers were making X% more, of course management was fully justified in rewarding their side with equal treasures, and even more.
In effect, there was collusion between the Detroit 3's management and the UAW.
There were other stakeholders who were severely affected, but had no say in these "sweetheart" deals among the antagonists. One stakeholder who was used and abused by this collusion and conspiratorial deals was the customer. Who was protecting the customer's interest?
With great hypocrisy, before during and after each contract negotiation, both sides waved the American flag, and claimed to represent and defend the interests of God, windows & orphans, the consumer, and the American people in general. Yeah, right!
Left to fend for themselves, a few brave customers protected themselves the only way they had left. They left the oligopoly owned by the Detroit 3, and went shopping for something else with a lower price, better quality, and more features.
Once a path through the deep, dark forest had been blazed by the frustrated consumer pioneers, that path away from the Detroit 3 and leading to the foreign auto makers soon became an 8-lane super highway full of defectors traveling at top speed towards a warm welcome.
The management of Detroit 3 and the UAW were locked into a costly wage death spiral, neither one willing to stop. They would let outside circumstance control the wage death spiral they had jointly created. Those outside forces and event may now be here.
Both parties knew the risks of their dysfunctional, folie a deux behaviour. As with most obsessive-compulsive behaviours, mentally ill patients are unable to control their behaviours, no matter how crazy they know their actions to be. They just can't stop themselves. Family, friends, and the medical community have to stop them, and get them the treatment they need.
For the Detroit 3 and the UAW, who should have acted as the family, friends, and medical community? To me, it seems natural that government should have played that role.
It wasn't that the government was unaware. Numerous media, consumer advocates, industry insiders, and the public in general knew these actions by the UAW and Detroit 3 would not end nicely. They knew for more than 20 years. They were reminded repeatedly. Little or no effective action was taken by anybody to intervene in this craziness.
Well, here we are, traveling at 100 mph just feet away from a head-on crash into an economic brick wall. Nice job! Thanks!
What should have happened more than 30 years ago?
Karl Marx defined "surplus value" as the economic engine of capitalism. To tie wages and benefits to anything else risks the decoupling or evaporation of the net surplus value at some uncertain future.
As an example, Toyota provides its N. American workers with a basic, guaranteed wage. In addition, numerous bonuses can be earned by the workers for improvements in safety, quality, environment, productivity, and a host of other important issues. No results, no bonus. Achieve the reasonable goals, and you get your bonus.
Secondly, the Japanese re-taught the current generations of Americans what previous generations of Americans had taught the Japanese: "You're only as good as your last improvement."
The Japanese word Kaizen (continuous improvement) expresses this as a cultural imperative. This means no matter how good you are today, you can always get better tomorrow.
No matter how far behind you are today, you will eventually catch your opponent if you accelerate (ie. improve) faster than they do. Once you are in the lead, your control your own destiny. As long as you continue your continuous improvement program, nobody can catch you, you will always be in the lead. Only if you stop or slow down your rate of improvement as compared to your competitors, will you lose. In other words, your competitors can't cause a win, but you can cause yourself to lose.
In 2005, I did a study (available for free at http://info.pqa ) on the automotive industry and world-class manufacturers. This study demonstrated that high rates of improvement can be achieved, as high as 7.65% per year, every year, for more than 10 years. That's 2,090% improvement in productivity over a 10 year period.
If the Detroit 3 and UAW had worked more co-operatively, with this shared vision, there would have been plenty of riches for all.
Instead, we now have a fight to the death by millions of scrawny rats; each claiming ownership of the few remaining crumbs from a wasteful, hedonistic banquet that ended long ago.
Would the Detroit 3 be in their current mess if they had achieved even a fraction of this world-class improvement rate that other manufacturing sectors have proven to be possible? I don't think so.
So what do we do now?
We wait for capitulation, or a bankruptcy, or an agreement by these deranged psychopaths to get treatment. Under previous rulings of the US Supreme Court, all union contracts are subject to re-negotiation or unilateral imposition of sanity by the courts. Alternatively, perhaps the "Car Czar" is just the ticket. Hopefully, both the Detroit 3 and the UAW agree to the imposition of binding arbitration by the Car Czar to set them straight, avoiding the need for a messy bankruptcy.
Hopefully, the Car Czar closes the circle so that this generation of bickering Americans can learn from their American forefathers (just as the Japanese did decades before), that everything comes from improved operations, elimination of waste, making every decision as a steward for the customer, and looking forward three generations into the future.
Every penny of wages and benefits, beyond the basic minimum wage, needs to be earned each and every day by real improvements. There is no free lunch, nor instant pudding. That's why they call it work.
] bought 51% of GMAC from GM in 2006 and also controls Chrysler Finance.
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