In a rather lengthy Bloomberg article on the UAW and Government General Motors’ prospects of survival sans additional federal intrusion, this money quote was made:
Union leaders and workers looking to win back concessions are stuck in a “time warp,” said David Littmann, senior economist for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research organization in Midland, Michigan, that promotes free-market principles.
“They want to make things the way they were, and they’re not,” Littmann said.
The jobs bank, which had a combined 25,000 Ford, GM and Chrysler workers at its peak in the early 1990s, was originally designed to retain trained workers who were temporarily displaced by productivity or business cycles. The program later became a symbol of the benefits union workers received as the U.S. government debated approving funds to save the industry.
“It became the welfare mother who drives a Cadillac,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
“It became the symbol of what was wrong with welfare.”The program’s stigma and the nation’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate will make it difficult for the union to win back some benefits, he said.
Is the UAW in a time warp?
The answer to that would be…
