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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It's not that simple.
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Told ya
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
When a guy has spent the past 30 years doing rote assembly work on a production line, getting good money and great benefits as a result of UAW contracts, his flexibility tends to be, um, limited. Some of these folks will be candidates for retraining. Others simply won't be capable of the change.
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I think there's a lot more to be said for human resilience; how many of those workers of "limited flexibility" are confusing "can't" with "won't"?
Just as the IT workers who lost their jobs as a result of the dotcom bust at the end of the '90s had to suck it up and get a real education, so will many manufacturing workers (not just UAW members) have to learn a new skill. No one can tell me the UAW was completely oblivious to the dent Japan put into our manufacturing base in the '80s, much less not think it could happen again; to believe otherwise would be a scary kind of naïveté. What literate person didn't see this coming at some point?
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Their company goes belly up, and their jobs no longer exist. What happens to them? Let them die? I can't think of many governments, and especially not ours, that would consider that an acceptable option.
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I didn't mean to literally let them starve. I also, however, don't think they deserve their own version of the VA.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The underlying political question is what the government's responsibility should be in such cases. There's a German economist getting interest at the moment, because he's been exploring the underlying issues. Germany faces problems similar to the US - a manufacturing economy trying to survive when foreign competitors have far lower labor costs. They have heavy layoffs, and he's concluded that a lot of the displaced workers just won't get new jobs. New jobs may be created, but they won't be jobs the displaced worker can do, and may not be jobs the displaced worker can be taught to do.
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I'm all about protecting the rights of workers. A long time ago, that's what unions were for. I was with the Carpenters Local 790 for a time. Got laid off anyway, and it was the best thing to ever happen to me because it opened my eyes to the fact that there's no such thing as a recession-proof business. I didn't have the benefit of watching my union president making the Sunday-morning talk show rounds like the UAW did. You said yourself (and I agree) that GM's implosion was a long time in the making; while we're both intelligent, I've yet to be convinced that we were the only ones to have seen it coming.
There will be some people who won't (economically) survive the change. As I've said before, they can either learn how to do something new or they can draw whatever benefits they have coming to them and blame the rest of the world for their problems. In either case, the big fat union paychecks and benefits are gone, and they're not coming back. It's not the fault of the workers that GM execs got greedy, but it is, at least indirectly, their fault that the UAW got just as greedy. In life, one can be the ant or one can be the grasshopper.