A Wonderful and Ignorant Family

I know it's the big deal at the moment, this Detroit automaker business, but there's a more transcendent lesson to be learned in this clime. When I see this:



I see a group of men and women who are economically ignorant. They seem to be a wonderful family, close-knit and proud of their lives' work. Between all of them they've given 300 years to GM plants. I know that I would love to spend time with their family because I've spent weekends away from Ann Arbor with many families just like theirs. They say things differently than I do (when referring to their entry into the GM workplace they say they were "hired in" to the company. Until Michigan I had never heard the preposition "in" paired with hired. "By" or "on", but never "in"), and they have fundamentally different worldviews, but they are generally warm, decent Americans.

Those wonderful qualities, though, don't stop UAW members from being the chief problem at the Big 3. Confront them with the simple comparison of non-union companies vs. unionized companies, and UAW members will give convoluted responses wandering from "subsidies" from Asia to "unfair labor practices". It's not that complicated. When you have inflexibility in an employment arrangement, you lose the ability to adapt and change. The unfortunate fact is that manufacturing is becoming less human-centric. More products can be made with less people. If a company can't pare down its workforce when it becomes more efficient, they become bloated and wasteful. They lose their ability to compete for profits. They turn into GM.