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Friday, January 9, 2008
OK, "Caterpillar" didn't make it. (No legs!) But give "Mr. Aflatoxin" time. The left is on the same side as kf on that one. ... 11:50 P.M.
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The kf Curse! It turns out that alleged CarCzar Designee Steven Rattner, endorsed in this space yesterday, has a large and embarrassing** conflict of interest. NY Post covers. ... More suprisingly, the New York Times picks up on the Post's sniping at Pinch Sulzberger's BFF. But only online (as far as I can see). Rattner's ... special status seems to continue in the print edition (although I won't know for sure until tomorrow)...
**--[Embarrassing?--ed He bought Blender!] According to the NY Post:
Cerberus [which owns Chrysler] recently notified Rattner and his group that they're in technical default of terms to repay a $125 million loan that he used to bankroll his $250 million purchase, two years ago, of sexy lad magazine Maxim and pop-music magazine Blender.
Guy who can't run Maxim wants to run GM! But he still wrote a great union-bashing article. ...11:25 P.M.
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Thrown into the Burris patch: What makes everyone so sure that Majority Leader Harry Reid was "beaten" and "outfoxed" in the matter of Roland Burris? He was beaten and outfoxed into having one more Democratic senator than he was counting on having. A few more of these beatings and he'll pass card check with 5 votes to spare. ... 10:00 P.M.
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Thursday, January 8, 2009.
I'm a skeptic when it comes to the genius of reporter-turned-banker and Pinch-buddy Steven Rattner. But he might make a good Car Czar, a position for which he's rumored to be the leading candidate. Why? Rattner covered the decline of the British auto industry for the NYT in the 1980s, and in the process wrote one of the best newspaper pieces ever published about autoworker unions [$]. Rattner compared the production of Ford Escorts at a German car plant with the production of the exact same vehicle at a U.K. plant. The German plant [in Saarlouis] was roughly twice as productive. The difference? An adversarial, work-rule-oriented union culture in Britain. Some excerpts:
But the resemblance ends at physical appearance. This [German] plant produces some 1,200 cars a day, more than the 1,015 that Ford planners had anticipated, and requires 7,762 workers. Its counterpart at Halewood, with virtually identical equipment and production targets, has averaged only about 800 cars a day this year, and 10,040 workers have been needed to achieve even that production level.
''Our standards say it should take something like 20 man-hours of labor in both the body and assembly plants to make an Escort,'' said Bill Hayden, vice president of manufacturing for Ford Europe Inc., in an interview. ''At Saarlouis, they do it with 21 hours. At Halewood it takes 40 hours.'' ...[snip]
Aside from statistics, subjective differences between the two factories become evident. Halewood seems to overflow with workers - some of them reading or eating, others kicking a soccer ball - while Saarlouis seems almost depopulated and nearly every worker in evidence is hard at his job. At Saarlouis, workers dash to open doors for visitors touring in electric carts, while at Halewood, one worker greeted a news photographer by exposing himself. ...[snip]
For their part, the workers at Halewood maintained in recent interviews that shop conditions at Saarlouis were unsafe. ''If that was in England, I'd stop the job immediately,'' said Stephen Broadhead, the ''convenor'' at the body plant, who has visited the German plant twice. ''It was such a violation of our health and safety regulations we couldn't live with it.'' Nonetheless, the Saarlouis plant has the lowest injury record in Ford's entire Europe subsidiary.
In one example mentioned by Mr. Broadhead, the Halewood union summoned a company doctor to rule that two men were required to lift the car hood onto the body, a job performed by one man at Saarlouis. But the other day at Halewood, only one man was lifting the hoods; the second man watched.
''From the very beginning it was always one man who picked up the hood, said Lothar Kotalla, a German worker here, as the dull silver car bodies moved along behind him, 58 an hour. ''It's heavy so we switch every hour.''
Such differences are found to pervade the two plants. In May, the workers at Halewood went on strike for 11 days because they contended that four men could not produce 60.2 transaxle assemblies an hour, as the company and the German experience suggested they could. Five months later, the four men are still assembling about 55 an hour. ...[snip]
Management's efforts are now concentrated on raising productivity, a painstaking process of identifying a bottleneck - at the moment, the assignment of workers and work in the paint shop - and negotiating at length with the unions to remove it. With various shop rules, moving one worker, part of a process known as ''rebalancing,'' often requires that five be shifted.
Does the U.A.W. read Times back issues? ... 2:54 P.M.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Alert reader D on the SEIU chief Andy Stern's defense of "card check" in a bloggingheads discussion with Robert Reich:
His substantive problem is that he assumes the conclusion, which is that workers need and want unions. Anything that interferes with that is therefore by definition wrong and is contrary to their will or at least to their best interests. If workers vote a union down it must be because they were intimidated, because a negative vote like that would be like a man voting against eating. It would be unnatural and open to suspicion. Stern could not stand up to a good interviewer for five minutes. Even Reich knew he was not responding to the question and was unconvincing - which is saying plenty.
One of the good things about bloggingheads is that if you can't make your case there you can't make it anywhere. You have the time, you have a non-disrespectful, non-cross-examining interlocutor, you're in familiar surroundings and don't have distractions.
In the process Stern dances around the issue of taking away the secret ballot, saying the issue is "whose choice about how to form the organization is this, the employers or the workers." No, the issue is how do you determine what the workers' choice is. If Stern wants to have a secret ballot about whether to have a secret ballot, then he'd be amending the labor law to give workers the choice he says he wants to give them. (Maybe that's not a bad compromise.) ...
P.S.: A common tactic of card check proponents is to say that opponents aren't really against the elimination of the secret ballot, they are really against unions. Hey, why can't I be against both? There are two legit issues here: democratic principle and whether more American-style unionization is the answer to our economy's problems. Yes, if there were a procedurally fair reform that promised to dramatically increase the unionization rate, I'd have a more difficult choice. But this isn't that case. I'm willing to bet that a) workers who vote anonymously, free of the collective social pressure that can come with public voting, will rationally decide, often enough, that the drawbacks of unionization (in terms of the adversarialization of the workplace, lost productivity, and winding up like Detroit) outweigh the benefits, and b) workers who do decide to unionize their companies will find those companies losing out in the marketplace and shrinking (as has been the case, most conspicuously, with Detroit). ... Bet (a), at least, is a bet Stern obviously doesn't want to take--even though in the bhTV interview Reich is clearly, if timidly, trying to push him in the direction of a package of reforms aimed at curbing employer "coercion" rather than ending the secret ballot. ... 7:54 P.M.
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"We don't report stuff like this" Except, you know, when it involves John McCain and not Pinch Sulzberger. ... Keep rockin! ... 6:01 P.M.
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Monday, December 22, 2008
The "Community" Strikes Back: Matt Yglesias is kidding either himself or us when he claims that he won't self-censor just because Jennifer Palmieri, "Acting CEO" of the outfit he blogs for (the "Center for American Progess Action Fund") commandeered his site** to post a disclaimer in BS-ese after Yglesias criticized a CAP ally. He writes:
Under the circumstances, it’s better for me, better for CAP and CAPAF, and better for everyone to understand that I’m writing as an individual not as the voice of the institution. Pointing that fact out isn’t contrary to me having an independent voice, it’s integral to having one. ...[snip] ... My role is to say what I think on the blog; that’s what I’ve always done and will keep doing.
No. Next time Yglesias wants to write something that might alienate one of CAP's numerous friends, he has to ask himself a) do I want Jennifer Palmieri to come squat on my blog again, and b) even if she doesn't, do I want the hassle of arguing with her or my bosses to prevent them from acting to ... er, "clarify" the situation in some other way? That has to tip the scales slightly--and, if my experience is any indication, more than slightly--in favor of pulling your punches and avoiding the hassle. ... Keep in mind, Palmieri didn't intervene because what Yglesias said was wrong--factually or logically---but rather simply because what he said differed from the position of the "institution." Why doesn't she get her own blog? ...
This is all hugely embarrassing for CAP. Palmieri, last seen helping John Edwards lie, owes Yglesias a published apology. I would think Yglesias could and should insist on it--he was a prestige acquisition for CAP, and it would damage them if he left. As things stand, he's been semi-emasculated.
Keep rockin'.
P.S.: Is the group Third Way's "domestic policy agenda" really "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit"? America wants to know! Or it does now! Isn't the first rule of flackery don't issue a denial that just gives more publicity to the charge you are denying? ...
**-- I should not have said "commandeered." I regret the error. CAP is a key leader in the progressive movement. I look forward to working with them in the future. What I meant to say is that Yglesias "allowed Palmieri an opportunity to issue a different opinion." Our fraternal Soviet comrades are welcome in Prague anytime! ... [via Insta] 9:58 P.M.
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