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December 8, 2008
Call your Senator and oppose the UAW full employment act
Congress, in bailing out the car companies, is not demanding that the United Auto Workers renegotiate labor contracts that are bankrupting the car companies.In fact, Congress is going to hand over your money without anyone really doing much of anything to fix problems.
This is unacceptable.Call your Senator at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose the auto industry bailout.
There is a good piece on this over at RedState. But this should not be a partisan issue. Although the Democrats are playing it as such. The proposal is 100% United Auto Worker pork and payback for them donating tens of milions to the Democrats in the recent election cycle. The auto companies need to go into bankruptcy so they can actually reorganize their businesses and make the hard renegotiations that need to happen. Including the labor contracts. Without bankruptcy, the companies are on the hook for the excessive labor contracts. Did you know that over at Ford when they laid off workers last year, the UAW contract required them to keep paying workers for 2 years! Wouldn't that be nice. That liability is a major factor in the companies not being economically viable.
The other is that they simply make too many cars. Lets do some simple math.
Americans: About 300M
New Cars/year: About 30M
Average life of a car: About 20 years.
See anything there? We are making cars at a 10 year replacement rate when they live 20 years. We are making 2X too many cars, using 2X too many employees, resources, etc. We only need about 15M cars/year to replace the old ones. Anything else is excessive consumption. We need an auto industry half the size. Do not let congress support the industry in the current form.
Posted by Martin at December 8, 2008 12:14 PM
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