But almost all of the discussion, when it comes to UAW culpability, has been on wages. The even larger issue, though, is the elephant in the room that seemingly no one discusses, even when given a political opportunity. For instance, I saw a “debate” on Fox News recently in which the Democrat defending the union said that it was partly management’s fault because of the poor quality of the cars, and the Republican failed to respond. And it’s not like people are unaware of it, at least people familiar with the industry. The issue isn’t wages — though those are a problem — so much as work rules. UAW work rules, which have evolved over the many decades since the passage of the Wagner Act, are the biggest reason that General Motors is uncompetitive with its non-union American counterparts.
What are work rules? They are agreements negotiated in the contract between management and the union covering how the employees are to be classified, how many breaks they get, how much time off they get, who can do which jobs, how discipline is to be enforced, etc. The goal of the rules is not to enhance productivity or production quality. It is to provide opportunities for featherbedding, increase numbers of (overpaid) jobs for union workers, and minimize how much they have to actually work. This is important because it’s at least in theory possible that the industry could be making money even at current wages, if they could be provided with the flexibility to increase worker productivity.
The article is full of little anecdotes to back up the author’s point. I have seen enough with my own eyes that I have no doubt that his point is correct.
But I still blame management for the problems. The power of unions is easy to overstate. A lot of times they are used as an excuse by managements for not doing their jobs.
Moreover, management could have refused to agree to those restrictions on their authority. But a lot of times, upper management thinks that such rules are relatively harmless compared to paying more money. I think they tend to think that all monkeys are the same. So they don’t feel like they are losing much when they give up the right to reward the better monkey.