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Anti-Worker Republicans Pressure White House for Deep Pay Cuts in Automaker Loan |
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After a small group of Republican senators put the economy in jeopardy by blocking an emergency bridge loan for the nation’s Big Three automakers, the same minority is pressuring the White House to demand some significant pay cuts from the UAW as a condition of any short-term financial assistance.
Bryce Hoffman writes in yesterday’s Detroit News that the White House may press union workers to accept the terms of a pay-cut amendment introduced by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), which would have required the UAW to accept deep concessions that would have effectively neutered the union.
He quotes Brian Johnson of Barclays Capital, who says there would be a political gain for the Republicans if the White House insisted on deep concessions.
We can see ample political logic (from the point of view of the Republican minority) for imposing strings along the lines of the Corker proposals. By including strings around union concessions, the Bush administration would be setting up a political challenge for the incoming Obama administration.
If the new administration leaves the strings in place, they would risk union ire, upsetting a large constituency that was helpful in winning the White House and a larger Senate majority. On the other hand, if the new administration were to introduce new legislation to override the strings, it could create a political stage for Republicans to argue that a “union giveaway” was in progress. Moreover, this would focus public attention on union demands, perhaps making it harder to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
What the Republicans are ignoring in this war against unions is that failure to help the automakers through this emergency situation will wreak havoc across the economy, the UAW points out, beginning with the loss of 3.3 million jobs, potentially costing taxpayers $150 billion in unemployment insurance, Medicaid, other aid and lost tax revenues.
Writing on Huffington Post, Art Levine says the fight over wages is just the next salvo in Republicans’ attempts to weaken or destroy unions.
The attacks against the UAW are not only a “dress rehearsal” for the fight against [the Employee Free Choice Act] organizing rights, as economist Mark Brenner of Labor Notes calls it, but part of a broader, long-standing pattern of weakened unions, three decades of stagnant real wages and corporate “wage theft” of owed money to workers that costs Americans billions each year.
Levine quotes Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice and author of Wage Theft in America, who denounced the Republican attacks while on the online radio show he co-hosts.
“It’s despicable that they would use what’s indeed a crisis in the industry to bash unions. Unions are both one of the best ways to get a middle-class job and one of the best vehicles for stopping and deterring wage theft,” which robs millions of workers of owed salaries and overtime. “We need more unions in the society, not fewer,” she declared.
In an interview on CNN, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger says it’s clear Congress “should be kept away from the bargaining table” and let the UAW and the automakers negotiate issues like wages.
He says President Bush understands the severity of the problem facing the auto industry and that he still expects the White House to produce a reasonable plan for emergency assistance to the Big Three. But congressional Republicans are another thing completely.
Gettelfinger tells CNN:
No matter what would have happened, I’m convinced the Republicans [in the Senate] would have found a reason to knock [the bridge loan] down. The Republican caucus wanted to doom this legislation and let it fail.
Click here to see the Gettelfinger interview.
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Yet (as the Washington Post reports today), under the huge financial industry bailout, executive pay is subject to no effective limitation (the flimsy restrictions in the original bill having been cleverly undermined by the Bush administration, with nary a peep out of the folks who have been so indignant about the UAW contracts).
After reading this article and listening to the Republicans fight for less pay for American workers, I am amazed at the vast number of UNION workers in states like PA, OH, GA,VA,etc that vote Republican just because the Party tell them that they are supporters of “hard working blue collar-white men” and are against “giving your money to someone else”. Now the Republicans are showing their real colors. The “hard working men”, i.e. “Joe the Plumber, JOe Six Pack, Joe the Fool” have the same in common; when the Republicans spoke of “giving your money to someone else” they really believed they were referring to black people and other minorities, but the Republicans are INDEED GIVING THEIR MONEY TO SOMEONE ELSE, they are called Corporate America (the White Collar white man). You reap what you sow.
This only shows America that the Republican Party is only for Corporate America. They did NOT require the folks from the banking industry to take pay cuts because they are not unionnized. The real goal here is to destroy the unions just like they have done in the South. The senators are all Southern States Senators and they are like the people they represent. In the South people are anti-union because they see the unions has fighting for job security for its workers. They don’t like this because it is job security for ALL workers and NOt just for the “Good Old Boys”.
Spending Christmas day at home with family and friends is as special to me as it is to anyone. However, the bridge loan is so important that I will give up Christmas at home to picket Senator Corker’s home in Chattanooga on Christmas day if a picket is called for. I live about 200 miles from Chattanooga but I can be available.
Bruce Dotson
President Upper East CLC
If the government were a business, all of the congress and senate should be in line for a big pay cut based on the national debt, trade imbalance and depth of this recession they put us in.
Let them drive there own cars to work and buy the gas. Force them in an HMO and pay co-pays on their health insurance and only go to doctors on the list. Let the PBCG take over THEIR pension plans and give them 10 cents on a dollar. Let their only pension be a 401K plan and social security. Give them a 50% pay cut and lay 25% of them off.
Maybe then they would have a real idea of what life in America is really like.
It starts with Judges that will tear up contracts in bankruptcy, then to these southern senators who still believe in slavery and call it “right to work”. What is worse are these “News Channels” who have good looking announcers show their ignorance and lack of understanding of what a union is. The U.S. needs the Free Choice Act. There is also badly needly an education of the public on what a Union means to them. I believe there is “Hate Education” agenda against Unions that is the legacy of these Republican Senators.