The UAW was notably missing from a list of stakeholders that congressional Democrats expect to make sacrifices in return for emergency loans. Those sacrifices were detailed in a November 21 letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California.

Republicans seem certain to address that oversight in a Thursday, December 4, Senate hearing. The House is scheduled to discuss the bailout Friday, December 5. …

The Jobs Bank costs the Detroit Three automakers $478 million a year, estimates Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint. Even if that program is eliminated, the union may be asked to accept additional concessions to fulfill Congress’ notion of shared sacrifice. …

Patel assumed that financial concessions would be split evenly between GM’s unions and creditors. With that in mind, he concluded that average wage-and-benefit costs would have to drop from $60 an hour to $44.

http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/…

The UAW pay and benefits have long been excessive and everyone but those like Brasch both know it and admit it. It obviously isn't union-bashing to say what's obvious, decades-long fact.

Union presence is now almost gone except where else, government. Unions do have a broader agenda than saving Detroit's long-failed model and the UAW. “Card Check” is only the beginning, and with “Card Check,” there's no need to wait for propping up Detroit while the modern industry in this country gets unionized — there's always the big, bad, mighty, evil Wal-Mart and then a number of other chains. Unionizing the service industry is a cherished dream. Other employment-related legislation like sick leave, pay equity, and the like is also on unions' agendas. And as this is more broad than the UAW-Detroit dinosaur situation, so it actually is with the far Left, which isn't limited to union goals. In addition to environmental extremism other at-home goals of the far Left or the so-called “progressive” community and related activists include expansion of gay rights (largely to get or to secure various measures of equity for GBLTs vs. straights), and so on.

As for Detroit and the legacy costs that are killing it. I'll advise people _again_ to read the kind of material some of us have tried to get you to read when it comes to things like the unsustainability of Social Security and Medicare as they exist today. In this case, it's the PBGC and a likely taxpayer bailout if Detroit Three go bankrupt. Unloading the pension plans is one of the first things that would happen. The PBGC is already troubled, and consider the state of the program now and what it would mean if the pension liabilities (funded and unfunded) were added. Any taxpayer bailout ought to be accompanied by reductions in the current schedule of maximum benefits, to reduce the costs and amount of any bailout.

http://www.pbgc.gov/workers-retirees/benefits-i…

http://www.pbgc.gov/workers-retirees/benefits-i…

http://www.pbgc.gov/media/news-archive/news-rel…

State of PBGC today — consider Big Three bankruptcies, other pension terminations from slump

http://www.pbgc.gov/media/news-archive/testimon…

http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forec…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122791812946865…

Management in Detroit is the main culprit, but UAW is the parasite that has been killing its stupid host. Gettelfinger simply was not credible when earlier this year he said the UAW should not make any more concessions, and that everything will be fine as of 2010, and that the JOBS [sic] bank is “almost gone.” (In fact, it's about to grow greatly if the Detroit Three make the reductions that are years overdue. And what matters is not the rosy and probably dishonest claims about how things will be in 2010, but how things are right now, when the companies are facing imminent bankruptcy in large part for refusal to engage in thirty-years-and-longer-overdue reform.) Management in Detroit, in a state not only of temporal but of developmental arrest, has long been stupid to buy labor peace so the UAW members can continue to be overpaid, and they are arrogant and disgraceful and disgusting as well as stupid to not have corrected their worst problems already, had a credible plan ready, but simply have gone to Washington initially expecting a bailout with little or no objection or argument. They and defenders of that attitude and of the status quo in Detroit are HUA bell-curve tail-enders.

It's enough to make better people snicker — What's the left-wing Democratic recovery plan? Make-work, a giant new Peace Corps like Americorps, non-military conscription (forced labor; slavery) as “national service,” or a massive federal welfare expansion, just re-named “national JOBS bank”?

[Take Sixties thinking and apply it in the early 1980s and you have Detroit's idea of "reform"]

http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0510/1…

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/uaw-boss-to-sa…

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/uaw-boss-big-r…

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/bailout-watch-…

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/uaw-job-bank-n…

As for _contemporary_ union issues, while the economic slump has constrained the craziest of lefties' dreams (except among the truly craziest, who want no limit to spending and want Everything Now), while hoping to keep the Detroit Three on life support until the UAW can implant itself in the modern auto industry in the USA, there's always an earlier goal of unionizing the mighty, evil Wal-Mart and other nation-wide chains (yes, including McDonald's), perhaps even inviting ACORN to push its “living wage” agenda along with unions' campaigns (including in the rest of government not already unionized; government is the last part of our society with a significant union presence other than the long-failed, about-to-die-without-federal-intervention Detroit Three). That's what an early rather than later “Card Check” effort is all about. Shackle the Mighty Wal-Mart, is the battle cry. The motels and restaurants (beginning with the chains), other targets (chains), can come later.

As for what we in the real world are thinking about currently, it's not just the likely and appropriate Chapter 11 bankruptcy of the Detroit Three, but what happens if the pension plans are terminated and given to the PBGC. As with Social Security and Medicare, which are unsustainable, about which we who know have tried largely in vain to educate the ineducable or unwilling about, so it is with PBGC. A taxpayer bailout of PBGC is probably inevitable, and in reading the following consider the size of the Detroit Three's pension obligations (constrained by PBGC benefit limits) added to the strain, and you'll see a taxpayer bailout would be needed. (Also consider the effect of the slump and more business failures other than the Detroit Three and auto making.)

http://www.pbgc.gov/media/news-archive/testimon…

Oh, and forget the overly generous pensions and retirement before age fifty, which is ridiculous (the modern reasonable age is seventy). The pension replacement scales are quite generous, and if a taxpayer bailout is needed, I have said before, we who come from a stronger moral position rightly demand a reduction in pension benefit payments not only to new Detroit Three retirees but to _all_ beneficiaries, to reduce the costs and the size of any taxpayer bailout.

http://www.pbgc.gov/media/news-archive/news-rel…

http://www.pbgc.gov/workers-retirees/benefits-i…

http://www.pbgc.gov/workers-retirees/benefits-i…

Those links are worth the intelligent reader's time, even if others would prefer reading, say, Brasch.

For anyone who believes the anti-union zealots out there, if every production worker for the big 3 worked FOR FREE, it would reduce the cost of their cars less than 5%

Better look elsewhere if we are to make a meaningful impact.