USW’s Bloom Takes Senior Auto Rescue Post

by James Parks, Feb 17, 2009

Ron Bloom

During his time as the United Steelworkers’ (USW‘s) director of corporate research, Ron Bloom helped revive and restructure 50 companies in bankruptcy. Now as special assistant to USW President Leo Gerard, Bloom is taking on a new assignment as senior adviser in the Treasury Department for U.S. auto industry restructuring.

Bloom began his career negotiating union contracts for low-wage workers under AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, when he  was president of  SEIU. Before he joined the USW, he specialized in dealing with corporations facing financial difficulties or undertaking corporate transactions. With an MBA from Harvard and experience as a vice president at the investment banking firm of Lazard Freres & Co., and his own firm, Keilin and Bloom, he has experience in corporate finance. While at the USW, his restructuring plans were recognized for preserving thousands of manufacturing jobs and health care benefits for workers and retirees alike.

Gerard says President Obama selected the “perfect negotiator, expert and innovative thinker when he chose Ron Bloom.”

Ron is very passionate in his belief that manufacturing is essential to a healthy economy. The auto industry relationship to manufacturing is as important as Goldman Sachs or Citibank is to the financial community. Ron knows this.

The administration was lucky to find a person who so deeply believes in the union movement and so clearly understands corporate finance, Gerard said. 

Saving the domestic auto industry is crucial to the economic renewal of the U.S. The steel, glass, auto parts, tires, and paper industries produce products for this industry and employ a quarter million of our members alone. 

Writing on The Nation, William Greider calls Bloom “a brainy veteran of investment banking.”

If  Treasury Secretary [Timothy] Geithner and [National Economic Council Director Larry] Summers will listen to Bloom on that and other matters, he might steer them away from disastrous errors.

Greider points out that Bloom’s critiques of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been “closely-reasoned” and based “on cool analysis.” He reminds readers that Bloom was right when he said former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was paying too much in taxpayer money for bank stocks in the largest financial firms but at prices deliberately inflated.

The public needs someone like this on the inside, sitting at the table with Treasury and White House officials, armed with a calculator and an independent mind. Let’s hope they listen to Bloom. Let’s hope they don’t toss him out of the room.

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