Senators to UAW: It's payback time
Daniel Howes
Detroit Free Press
They failed repeatedly to organize the foreign-owned auto plants proliferating down South, even now.
Their political action committee pumped millions -- $1,918,450 this election cycle alone, to be exact -- into the congressional campaigns of Democrats and only $12,500 into Republicans, according to opensecrets.org. In their 1999 contract, they won Election Day off and used it to back their (generally Democratic) candidates, a source of recurring irritation among the southern GOP stalwarts.
They ignored the Republicans, even auto state Republicans, who represent the so-called "New American Manufacturers" in places such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.
Those are the same states whose senators stood astride the $14 billion auto bailout bill Thursday saying, "No" -- imperiling life as generations of United Auto Workers have known it.
Now a federal bailout for Detroit's automakers appears close to dead, delivering a crushing blow to a Michigan economy reeling from high unemployment, skyrocketing home foreclosures and sagging tax revenue. The obstructionists: southern Republicans determined to use a financial crisis to rework corporate balance sheets and rewrite collective bargaining agreements on their terms and timetables.
Paybacks can be hell when business meets politics, as union leaders, their members and tens of thousands of folks associated with the Detroit-based auto industry are seeing clearly in the wrangling to craft an emergency bill to throw lifelines to beleaguered General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
Stripped bare and put in the regional context of union vs. nonunion and domestic vs. foreign, the toughened conditions pushed by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., are legislative cruise missiles aimed directly at Detroit's business model, the UAW's Solidarity House and 70 years of Big Three bargaining tradition
(More here.)
Detroit Free Press
They failed repeatedly to organize the foreign-owned auto plants proliferating down South, even now.
Their political action committee pumped millions -- $1,918,450 this election cycle alone, to be exact -- into the congressional campaigns of Democrats and only $12,500 into Republicans, according to opensecrets.org. In their 1999 contract, they won Election Day off and used it to back their (generally Democratic) candidates, a source of recurring irritation among the southern GOP stalwarts.
They ignored the Republicans, even auto state Republicans, who represent the so-called "New American Manufacturers" in places such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.
Those are the same states whose senators stood astride the $14 billion auto bailout bill Thursday saying, "No" -- imperiling life as generations of United Auto Workers have known it.
Now a federal bailout for Detroit's automakers appears close to dead, delivering a crushing blow to a Michigan economy reeling from high unemployment, skyrocketing home foreclosures and sagging tax revenue. The obstructionists: southern Republicans determined to use a financial crisis to rework corporate balance sheets and rewrite collective bargaining agreements on their terms and timetables.
Paybacks can be hell when business meets politics, as union leaders, their members and tens of thousands of folks associated with the Detroit-based auto industry are seeing clearly in the wrangling to craft an emergency bill to throw lifelines to beleaguered General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
Stripped bare and put in the regional context of union vs. nonunion and domestic vs. foreign, the toughened conditions pushed by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., are legislative cruise missiles aimed directly at Detroit's business model, the UAW's Solidarity House and 70 years of Big Three bargaining tradition
(More here.)
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