Folks in economics often commented that the auto industry was the leading force of the economy so if they struggled the US in general struggled and visa versa. I understand the CEO comment but I’m talking folks in economics like Dr. Carson, my old prof among others. Pick pick pick.
In fairness, they’d have done fine with that union contract if they hadn’t screwed up their cars. When they inked that contract they had enough money to cover it. Then they churned out godawful heaps for 30 years and wondered why fewer people were buying GM’s. That led to the financial problems.
And yeah, some of that was assembly, but more of it was beancounters insisting on cheaping out on almost everything in order to chase quarterly profits instead of long term reputation and financial stability.
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I have baggage. I used to work in a steel mill. A strong union forces a lot of rules that increase costs dramatically. It isn’t just hourly wages, but work rules that increase the costs. As an example, we had a couple of machines in the QA lab that bumped up a head on a wire rod sample to check for surface flaws. When that machine went down, there wasn’t a repairman or even two. Instead, there were a couple of mechanics, a couple of electricians, and an oiler. When they weren’t repairing machines, they sat back and waited for the next failure. Other workers did planned maintenance. This is just one example of padding the employee rolls.
In addition, the hourly workers would set up situations where a foreman would send them home for breaking rules, then complain to the shop steward. The shop steward would take it up the line in a grievance, and the aggrieved employee would get paid for playing the Let’s Screw Management game. How’s that for fairness?
The only time I had a problem it was night time I was at a loading dock somewhere in Ohio there was a couple of burned out florescent tubes in the overhead lighting every thing in that area came to a stop until they got the union electrician who lived about an hour away to come in on overtime from his house and back to do a ten minute job
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I was a janitor in college, sweet gig as I was in a ladies dorm, and they would clean up before I got there and bring me coffee. Too many horror stories from the people that worked the guys dorms. Relevant point to your comment, we were not allowed to change light bulbs, had to have an electrician do it.
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Yeah, and no one’s arguing that union contracts are universally fair to the company. On the other hand, other rules that increased costs dramatically included 40 hour work weeks, overtime, and vacation. Not to mention rules that impacted the safety of the workers. There was a time in this country when factories didn’t bother much with safety. Guy falls into an industrial meat grinder? Eh, whatever, just grab the next guy in the looking-for-work line and stick him in the job. We might still be there if it weren’t for unions.
And I can’t really get too upset about unions insisting on discrete functions for discrete jobs. After all, if you can make the janitor change light bulbs, you increase the janitor’s workload usually without increasing their pay. Lack of defined job functions leads to downsizing and worker abuse in that those who are left are expected to pick up the slack without any extra compensation - rather they’re supposed to just be grateful for the miserable job they have.
That’s one way to run a society, but it’s not a society I really want to live in. Maybe my perspective would be different if I were a robber baron of old, but that seems unlikely to happen. 
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I worked in two union shops and one non-union shop. I never really experienced the kind of waste talked about. Fork lifts though were off limits to everyone except the drivers is about all I saw. True some of the equipment was complicated and had designated mechanics. You didn’t necessarily want anyone working on them. I think a lot of it is a reflection on the management and how they relate to the labor force. Stock plans and profit sharing probably had something to do with it too. Now if you want to talk union waste, take a look at how many school administration workers have been added over the last 20 years.
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I know that unions have done a lot of good for their employees. I had uncles and cousins that were hourly employees in a steel mill, and it helped them have good lives.
Job compartmentalization was taken to the extreme, as i said above. I never said that the jobs should have been ill defined, only that the could have been more efficiently defined. The same workers that were doing planned maintenance could have been pulled to work on unplanned maintenance when the machines broke. Further, they could have been repairmen trained to repair the entire machine. Most of our machines were not so complicated that the hourly people I worked with couldn’t handle it. It would have meant a staff about one half the size of the one when I worked there, and the savings could have been passed along to the customers. Lower costs would have slowed or stopped less expensive foreign steel imports and save all those jobs that are now gone.
I have always thought the the unions were a good idea when they started but like everything else when politics got in to it everything went down hill.
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And what would have happened is that those guys would have gotten the training necessary to repair the machines, and then not be compensated appropriately for their expertise. By which I mean “here are more responsibilities you’re required to take on, and if you screw up we’ll probably fire you, but you’re not getting a raise.”
That leads to:
Yes, because we’ve decided that adversarial capitalism is the best economic system to pursue. We’ve literally engineered an entire society in which everyone is expected to scrap for their own interests while fully aware that everyone they’re scrapping with would force them to work for free if they could get away with it (and in fact, that’s exactly what did happen for our first 100 years as a country). When you set up a system like that rather than a more reasonable “let’s mutually determine what’s fair to both parties and do that,” then you can’t be surprised when labor applies the same standards of unreasonableness as does management.
The real problem isn’t that unions are snarfing up more than their share. The real problem is that we’re so invested in the combative negotiation model that if unions don’t go for more than their fair share, they’ll end up with significantly less than their fair share. At that point, if management signs the contract, what union in its right mind would say “well now hold on, let’s back down from our ask because we think it’s unfair to the owners?”
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The Union was way ahead of you. They had labor rates negotiated for every job. More responsible jobs received better pay. Top hourly jobs paid about as well as General Foreman jobs. Turn foreman ran operations on each shift and they were a two levels below the General Foreman. The top hourly workers on each turn made more than the turn foreman they worked for. Even the lowest rated jobs had excellent hourly rates. New workers tended to fill in for more senior workers and they made less because they worked fewer hours. They were paid the same wages when doing the same job. Also, I guess you were talking about merit raises in a union shop, and they just don’t exist. The union and management negotiated the pay rates and the only way to get a raise was to place into a higher paying job, usually based on seniority. As for firing hourly workers, that just didn’t happen, even for drunks. They got so many “second” chances that the turn foreman just put them on a bench to sleep it off because they knew the union would keep the guy employed.