So I was watching Hardball yesterday, and they had the Mad Money guy on there to talk about the UAW/GM strike. He said this is all about union busting, and I have to think that this was being thought about at GM. However, what he said next was, that the only way to save GM was for GM to win the labor negotiations and break the union. Mr. Mad Money said the only way for the union to get the job security it wants is for the union to be destroyed because no American Business can operate with a union as strong as the UAW. And this time you have to give some credit where credit is due to Chris Mathews when he asked Crammer how an ex-CEO of GM can say "what is good for GM is good for America," when you are taking all of the jobs out of America.
Crammer's argument is all about the shareholders as evident for this comment:
The thing is, if GM were to bust the union, do you really think Ford and Chrysler wouldn't try and do the same exact thing? Next would come the suppliers, and then the steel workers, and then every other union in America and I'm sorry but that's not ok. We don't make the US more competitive on the world market by knocking it down. It seems like a lot of these people would love it if workers in the US would work for the same amount as they do in China and live in Company owned slums connected to the factory. But these people forget that if people don't make money, how can they be expected to spend money. If people only made $5/hr in this country do they really think people would still buy cars, or DVDs, or Toys, or anything else? If these companies actually got what they wanted and only paid people minimum wage and no benefits then there would be thousands of companies failing by the end of the quarter and thousand more by the end of the year. The entire economy would be in ruins in the blink of an eye.
At least Crammer did concede that some kind of Government run health care would help to save American jobs, but he is dead wrong about busting all unions.
Crammer's argument is all about the shareholders as evident for this comment:
"If GM is successful and they bust the union, I'm tellin' you you're going to have a five fold increase in this stock. And in the end, this is America and that's what we care about... Well, I think if you root for UAW, than you should just let GM go away.”He seems to be saying in his rant that if you want to keep manufacturing in America, it must be non-union and you must allow these companies to move these non-union jobs to other counties. It seems to me what he is trying to say is that if a manufacturing company is based in the US even if everything it manufactures is done so in other counties than that company is still manufacturing in the US.
The thing is, if GM were to bust the union, do you really think Ford and Chrysler wouldn't try and do the same exact thing? Next would come the suppliers, and then the steel workers, and then every other union in America and I'm sorry but that's not ok. We don't make the US more competitive on the world market by knocking it down. It seems like a lot of these people would love it if workers in the US would work for the same amount as they do in China and live in Company owned slums connected to the factory. But these people forget that if people don't make money, how can they be expected to spend money. If people only made $5/hr in this country do they really think people would still buy cars, or DVDs, or Toys, or anything else? If these companies actually got what they wanted and only paid people minimum wage and no benefits then there would be thousands of companies failing by the end of the quarter and thousand more by the end of the year. The entire economy would be in ruins in the blink of an eye.
At least Crammer did concede that some kind of Government run health care would help to save American jobs, but he is dead wrong about busting all unions.
