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Yea, we still can make it in America. Check out this Super Bowl ad for the Chrysler 200 — Made in America; Made by union brothers and sisters in Motown, Motor City, Detroit.

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Some lies are just tiny fibs, reshading the truth just a little bit, something all of us—except for the purest of heart—have done.  Then there is the whopper, the bald-faced lie that completely blots out the truth. Just like what Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said the other day.

Thanks to the 2009 federal loan agreement to help General Motors and Chrysler stay afloat, both companies have dug themselves out of deep financial holes and are restoring jobs.

Last week at a ceremony at GM’s Spring Hill, Tenn., plant to celebrate the rehiring of 483 workers to build a line of fuel-efficient EcoTec engines, Corker, who ranted and railed against the government help to save the auto industry, took credit for the government help to save the auto industry. Here is what he said. Really.

At the end of the day we all have to feel good about what we did, I contributed to strengthening the auto industry in this country.

Politicians do have a vastly different truth formula than the rest of us use, but even so, Corker’s claim to saving the auto industry is as far from the truth as Saskatchewan is from Rio de Janeiro in miles (6,285) and culture (use your imagination). (more…)

--------- Tula Connell --------- Photo by Joe Kekeris

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Higher profits and new fuel-efficient models have put American-made cars back on the road again—with the help of taxpayers and the workers who have worked closely with the Big Three automakers to ensure their success.

In July, Ford posted a stronger-than-expected quarterly profit of $2.6 billion—some $1 billion more than analysts predicted—with promises of more earnings in 2011. Chrysler, which cut its net loss to $197 million from January through March, expects to announce its second-quarter earnings in mid-August. General Motor’s (GM’s) U.S. sales for June rose 11 percent from the year-ago period and the company is again building popular cars.

Says UAW President Bob King:

The commitment, sacrifices and hard work of the men and women at UAW-represented companies is an enormous part of the positive news coming from Ford, GM and Chrysler, where UAW members are producing best-in-class quality results and building vehicles that hands-down beat global competition. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Rosie the Riveter defiantly rolls up her blue work shirt to show off a brawny bicep. She’s a symbol of American strength.

She worked in a manufacturing job, one of millions that constructed the defense machine that won World War II for the Allies. She said, “We can do it.” And America did.

Now, however, shuttered U.S. factories and off-shored manufacturing are sapping American strength. The nation has lost more than 40,000 manufacturing plants and one-third of its manufacturing jobs, nearly six million, over the past dozen years. China is on the verge of overtaking the U.S. in manufacturing output. And Americans know it. Late in April, 58 percent of 1,000 likely voters told pollsters they believed America’s economy no longer led the world.

They also told pollsters they supported enacting a national manufacturing policy to promote resurgence of domestic production — a return to the days of a robust Rosie the Riveter and a country that could secure its independence with dynamic manufacturing capability.

Democrats in Congress heard that message. They’ve created a program called “Make It in America.” They plan to pass a series of bills to create an environment in which both Americans and American manufacturers make it. “We want everybody to make it in America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as she described the plan to 2,000 bloggers and progressive activists at Netroots Nation 2010 last week in Las Vegas.

After all the support America has given the financial sector – estimated to total more than $4 trillion – it’s time for Congress to invest in the productive sector, the one that creates jobs, real wealth and American power.

 “We must stop the erosion of our manufacturing base, our industrial base, our technological base,” the Speaker told Netroots Nation, “It is a national security issue to do so,  if we had no other justification,” she said, adding that there are, of course, plenty of other reasons.

She said the strategy is to pass “one bill after another” supporting American manufacturing. The House started last week with two, one to ease American industries’ access to raw materials and parts and another to improve specialized workforce training.

In addition, Speaker Pelosi said, House leaders want to address currency manipulation – the deliberate undervaluing of currency to make a country’s exports artificially cheap and imports into that country artificially expensive. Currency manipulation by China, for example, is believed by both conservative and liberal economists to be adding as much as 40 cents to every dollar of the cost of U.S. products exported to China and discounting Chinese goods sold in the U.S. by 40 cents on every dollar.

 “There is a strong interest in our caucus in holding China accountable for manipulation of currency. That would make a tremendous difference in our trade because currency manipulation is really a subsidy to their exports to America – an unfair advantage,” the Speaker said at Netroots Nation.

Other bills Speaker Pelosi hopes to pass soon include $5 billion in tax credits for domestic manufacturers that produce components for alternative energy and a requirement that foreign manufacturers keep at least one worker stationed in the U.S. so the company can be officially served with court papers. Also, there’s a bill by Illinois Congressman Daniel Lipinski that would require each U.S. president to produce a manufacturing strategy in the second year of office and to review progress annually.

The survey that prompted Democrats to create the “Make It in America” program was commissioned by the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and conducted by Democratic pollster Mark Mellman and Republican pollster Whit Ayres. They found that likely voters believed creating manufacturing jobs was more important than reducing the federal deficit and more important than cutting government spending.

The survey also showed strong support for policies requiring the government to buy American-made goods. Similarly, it showed the Democrats, Independents and Republicans surveyed felt the quality of products manufactured in American exceeded those made in China, Japan, India and Germany.  

Americans now even prefer U.S.-made cars: An Associated Press-GfK Poll in April showed 38 percent of Americans favor U.S. vehicles. Asian brands got 33 percent.

Chrysler takes advantage of that sentiment in its commercial for the new Grand Cherokee. The words are chilling:

“The things that make us American are the things we make,” it begins.

“This has always been a nation of builders, craftsmen, men and women for whom straight stitches and clean welds were matters of personal pride.  They made the skyscrapers and the cotton gins, colt revolvers, Jeep 4-by-4s,” the ad continues. 

“These things make us who we are,” the narrator says. Yes. The things Americans make, make the country strong.  

To the sound of a sledge hammer pounding a railroad spike, the narrator goes on to describe the reborn Grand Cherokee, “This, our newest son, was  imagined, drawn, craved, stamped, hewn and forged here, in America.   It is well-made and it is designed to work. This was once a country that made things, beautiful things, and so it is again.”

Well, not quite.  Chrysler may make a terrific Grand Cherokee in Michigan. But American manufacturing needs some help. And with unemployment stuck at 9.5 percent, so do the American people.  “Make it in America” is that aid.  The AAM poll showed 85 percent of those who said the U.S. had lost economic leadership believed America could regain it.

Americans believe we can still do it.

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Make sure Congress acts. Join the One Nation Working Together march on Washington Oct. 2 to demand good jobs, as well as Wall Street and immigration reform.

The Financial Times just devoted a special section of the paper to “individuals and companies who have displayed courage and vision in the aftermath of the most wrenching financial crisis since the Great Depression.” This piece of journalism — and the awards that were granted — were especially designed “to recognize boldness on a global scale.”

A few years ago, in a book I titled It Takes a CEO: It’s Time to Lead With Integrity (Free Press, 2005), I tried to identify all of the traits — including boldness — that I believe characterize truly successful CEOs. It would have been a pleasure to collaborate with the FT’s editor and writers — they did a great job — however, when it came to matching specific companies and CEOs with leadership attributes, I think that in at least one instance they missed the “Integrity” trait.

Let me elaborate.

In its foreword, the FT said: “While recognizing the profit imperative, these awards have also paid due weight to the impact of a company on the wider community, whether through innovation, education or philanthropy.”

But there are a lot more things — and, especially, a lot more important things — than what flows from “innovation, education or philanthropy.” Specifically, it’s the impacts on employees, communities and nation which are transcendent, and given how extremely difficult this current economy is, we should be particularly interested in how these impacts significantly help strengthen the American economy and create jobs.

When the FT chose Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Fiat and now also of Chrysler, for its Driver of Change Award, it picked a CEO who is responding admirably to these two economic challenges. And in Marchionne, the FT also found a recipient who evidences an abiding responsibility to others than just his shareholders, and who leads his life with grace.

For most of the last century, American industry’s successes were hallmarked by a commonly held belief among CEOs that they had equal responsibility to shareholders, employees, customers, communities and the nation — and the nation as a whole was the beneficiary. It wasn’t until the late ’80s, with the advent of ‘trickle down economics’ and wildly excessive executive compensation, that this sense of responsibility began to be noticeably and widely lost.

On the day that he became the CEO of Chrysler, Marchionne said, “No executive has the birthright to lead, and no company has the right to exist” — and ever since, in trying to fulfill his stated commitment to creating a ‘sustainably profitable company,’ he has shown great sensitivity to the communities in which Chrysler operates, to the nation — the United States — which gave him and Fiat the Chrysler opportunity, and, notably, to the employees of Chrysler who for two decades bore the brunt of the company’s really crappy senior management. Beyond owning a large piece of the company through their Union, the employees of Chrysler are now active at the Board level in its management and, when hard decisions need to be made, they have a major role in working them out fairly.

The other trait that is a sine qua non of a great CEO is grace, a fine old trait with religious roots that in today’s corporate and secular worlds denotes dignified, polite and decent behavior and, especially, the capacity to accommodate and forgive people. It’s living your life to earn and keep the respect of others — and while hard to describe, we all know grace when we see it, and we all miss it when we don’t.

Mr. Marchionne seems to live this way, and a telling example is the relative ease and fairness with which he reached agreement with Chrysler’s beleaguered employees and their primary union, the United Auto Workers. (Of course, no one gets it right all the time or in all ways, and I must note that Marchionne, who is definitely a tough guy in a very tough business, still has some important fence mending to do with the Teamsters, which he needs to get to.)

All in all, however, Sergio Marchionne was a great choice to receive the Driver of Change Award. Which is why the FT’s choice of Roger Agnelli and the company Vale to receive its Emerging Markets Award is so puzzling, as pretty clearly the FT failed to require each of its Award recipients to manifest both grace and broad stakeholder responsibility.

Vale is a 67-year old Brazilian company that many people still remember as Companhia Vale do Rio Doce or CVRD, and that until fairly recently operated essentially only in Brazil. It is now in 36 countries and the world’s largest producer and exporter of iron ore, and thus certainly worthy of a lot of recognition. And to its particular credit, much of Vale’s growth has been organic and achieved through steady investments in modernizing its mines and rail and port infrastructure, especially in South America and Africa which it sees as “the future of the world’s natural resources and of food production.”

But what really angers me is that all the while Vale has been executing of late on its grand global mission, it is, to quote the FT, “embroiled in a long-running dispute” with its workers here in North America, a dispute that I lay squarely at the feet of its CEO, Roger Agnelli, and that arises from nothing other than Vale’s greed and Agnelli’s obstinacy.

And all the while, Vale, under the leadership of Agnelli, is also a long way from being the world’s ‘most environmentally friendly’ mining company, and it has at best only a passing interest in seeing South America and Africa enjoy the important fruits of non-resources based development. It is critical that powerful nations and powerful multinational corporations never again treat with disregard countries, regions and continents as their storehouses, bread baskets, cheap labor sources, or environmental dumping grounds — yet this is precisely what Vale does every day, to one degree or another.

Now, here in North America we are seeing firsthand Vale’s insensitivity to its workers and their communities, as it tries to run away from fair wages and benefits that are the product of longtime collective bargaining.

When Vale purchased the large nickel mining company Inco in a high-value auction in late 2006, it promised not to reduce the workforce for three years. But the company, now called Vale Inco, broke that pledge in a big way in March 2009 when it laid off workers and shut down operations for two months. Immediately thereafter, the company demanded from its remaining workers, who are mostly represented by the United Steelworkers, harsh concessions while conditioning any bargaining on workers first accepting these concessions.

As unfair as they would be in good times, the cruelty of these demands in a recession is beyond the pale — and then to further drive home its power over its employees, Vale used the resulting — and ongoing — strike as the excuse to cut many of its ties with local services companies and to offshore that work and related jobs. Almost nothing in labor relations is more vile than ‘conditioned bargaining,’ yet Vale has made this approach the base of its demands — and just this past weekend, using this demand, it again cavalierly broke of all negotiations for the umpteenth time.

For all the accolades it is receiving from the financial community — heck, the company earned $5.3 billion in 2009! — Vale is obviously employing the global economic crisis to impose on Vale Inco its philosophy that corporations bear no duty to meaningfully share gains with or to accept long-term responsibilities to others than just shareholders. Vale’s concessionary demands clearly illustrate this intent — even if the concessions Vale is demanding saved the company $25 million in the first year, which is a fair estimate, they would change Vale’s cost of extracting nickel by only about 5 cents per pound, yet these demands, which have been accompanied by some of the most aggressive anti-union tactics since the Appalachia ‘coal wars’ in the 1930s, would economically devastate the company’s 3,500 union employees and their communities.

Politicians of all stripes are fond of saying that “our best days are still ahead of us,” or words to that effect. Part of me — my heart, I think — dearly wants to agree with this.

The problem, however, is that getting to these best days isn’t going to happen automatically. Whether as a person, a CEO, a company or a society, it’s going to take smarts, courage, vision, sacrifice and persistence — plus, for the CEO in that crowd, grace and a broad, unselfish sense of responsibility.

***
Leo Hindery Jr. is the author of  “It Takes a CEO: It’s Time to Lead With Integrity” (Free Press, 2005). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. Currently an investor in media companies, he is the former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), Liberty Media and their successor, AT&T Broadband.

***

A YouTube film about the strike:

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

In New York, the oldest and snobbiest financial and advising ventures are called “white shoe” firms.

This, they say, arose from the days when their hoity-toity employees wore white bucks to work. 

These days, white shoe firms bear names notorious outside New York, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. That’s because their arrogance, risky investments and confounding dealing in derivatives caused last fall’s Wall Street meltdown, slaughtered white shoe firms like Lehman Brothers, froze credit nationwide, and threw the rest of us into the Great Recession. 

Now unemployment is up to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high. Banks repossessed 88,000 homes in September and filed foreclosure notices on another 344,000, according to RealtyTrac. Suicide hotlines report increases in calls, and a study released in July by researchers at several universities including the University of California documented the connection between unemployment, suicide and murder. Each percent increase in unemployment raised suicide rates by .8 percent and homicide rates by .8 percent, the research team found.

There’s blood on those white bucks. But the guys wearing them don’t seem to notice.

When bankers’ backs were up against the wall, the taxpayers of the United States bailed them out to the tune of $700 billion. Some, like Bank of America, took the welfare then repaid that generosity by doling out billions in bonuses. BofA got $45 billion from taxpayers, then gave $3.6 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch workers, just as BofA bought Merrill — which lost $25 billion in 2008. 

Banksters always argue that they must pay massive bonuses to reward and retain their best and brightest. Yet the best and brightest had managed to undermine Wall Street and lose $100 billion at the nine firms that received government welfare in 2008.  Realistically, finding lower-cost replacements for them shouldn’t be a problem since lots of unemployed bankers are pounding New York streets. The New York City Office of Management and Budget determined that Wall Street banks cut 30,000 jobs in 2008.

Still, Wall Street continues to reward incompetence. Morgan Stanley, for example, increased the proportion of its revenues to be paid as compensation and benefits – to total a whopping $6 billion by September — despite three straight losing quarters this year. This is how the London Telegraph characterized the decision in an Oct. 21 story:

“Investment bank Morgan Stanley has more than doubled the share of revenues it will hand out in pay and bonuses to its 62,000-strong army of bankers and brokers despite a 91 pc drop in profits last quarter.”

Right now, they’d each get $96,774, but Morgan Stanley has another quarter to add to that pool of pay.

Investment house Goldman Sachs has set aside $11.4 billion so far for compensation, setting a pace for an average Goldman worker to get $773,000. That would more than double last year’s earnings for the average Goldie.

Contrast that with the U.S. Census report that the typical worker nationwide lost $1,860 for a reduced wage of $50,303. Or compare it to the experience of the woman in the Oct. 21 New York Times story who competed with 500 other applicants for one $13-an-hour clerk job opening at an Indiana trucking company.

When America’s median income workers paid to bail out those white shoe swells, they thought something would change. “There is some failure in the finance industry to appreciate the level of public antagonism toward whatever Wall Street symbolizes,” Orin Kramer, a Democratic fund-raiser who is a partner in an investment firm, told the New York Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick earlier this month.

Dr. Daniel E. Fass, who was chairing a Democratic fundraising event with Kramer, told the Times’ Kirpatrick, “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.”

And, indeed, they’re acting like it never happened. JPMorgan Chase & Co. went out this year and made billions doing exactly what caused the crash last year – trading like crazy in derivatives. 

So a parent figure had to step in. The Obama Administration acted this week. The Federal Reserve announced it would crack down on pay packages at the nation’s 28 largest banking companies in ways intended to discourage risky practices. And the Treasury Department announced that it will order pay cuts and perk limitations for top officials at the firms still on welfare. They are Citigroup, Bank of America, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler and the automakers’ financing agencies.

This new lifestyle will be devastating for some of those on welfare. Their perks could be limited to $25,000 – only half of a typical American worker’s annual salary. And the cash portion of their salaries could be slashed by 90 percent and replaced by stock that cannot be sold for years. The point is to align their personal interests to the firm’s long-term financial health.  It is an attempt to discourage risky investments that seemed profitable for the purpose of immediate bonus payments but later exploded like the AIG derivatives scandal. 

The white shoe crowd, failing to understand that the president was trying to help them clean up the mess at their feet, immediately started whining and complaining. It just wouldn’t work, they said, because pay-pinched executives would run to firms unrestricted by the government. That’s all for the good because, again, there are 30,000 Wall Streeters searching for jobs.

The pay restrictions will set a proper tone. Perhaps Wall Street will hear it before, as the New York Times described it, “populist animosity toward Wall Street and corporate America” grows too great.

If that happened, the blood on their white bucks might be their own.

Roger Bybee

By Roger Bybee
Milwaukee Freelance Writer

As rescue attempts go, the Obama administration and its Auto Task Force are pursuing a peculiar course: They seem intent on keeping General Motors and Chrysler afloat as corporate entities by tossing more U.S. workers overboard.

Even as unemployment rates soar in longtime GM-centered communities hit by shutdowns, such as Janesville, Wis. (14.7 percent), and Flint, Mich. (15.3 percent), Obama and his task force pressed GM and Chrysler for more cuts. GM plans to shut down at least 14 factories and discard some 21,000 workers. Chrysler is closing eight U.S. plants, though it claims that somehow its merger with Fiat will result in a new increase of 5,000 jobs. In a telling observation that carried unsettling echoes of Bill Clinton’s push for NAFTA, the New York Times called the job cuts and other worker sacrifices “steps that most analysts thought could never be pushed through by a Democratic president allied with organized labor.”

The most recent version of GM’s recovery plan-closely tailored to the demands of the task force-calls for a stunning 98 percent increase in autos produced in Mexico, China, South Korea and Japan for the U.S. market. In May, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Steelworkers launched a 36-city campaign to prevent GM “from importing small cars from China, a move that would have increased GM’s profits while very likely reducing the number of domestic automobile jobs,” the New York Times reported June 2. This last-minute drive was successful, but it’s still unclear exactly what modifications GM will make.

For its part, Chrysler announced May 1 (the day after it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy) the closing of its Kenosha, Wis., engine plant and the transfer of many of the plant’s 850 jobs to Mexico. As recently as the day before, top Obama administration and Chrysler officials had assured Wisconsin legislators that the Kenosha plant would be preserved. Faced with a firestorm of protest for using federal dollars to transfer jobs to Mexico, Chrysler now says that Fiat will consider keeping the plant open.

On top of all that, job losses will balloon with the closing of more than 1,100 GM and 789 Chrysler dealerships, eliminating tens of thousands more jobs.

Although Obama hasn’t ordered auto industry cuts himself, “the revamping of the nation’s largest car company is being guided by the administration’s auto-industry task force, and it follows the president’s calls for a leaner, healthier industry,” DowJones.com reported on May 12. The Obama administration’s downsizing of the auto industry, established as a precondition for approximately $30.5 billion extended thus far in loans to GM and Chrysler (with another $20 billion in the pipeline), sharply contrasts with the lightly-conditioned, larger bailout of Wall Street. Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage, a forthcoming book on the Wall Street meltdown and its roots in Washington, estimated that Wall Street has received $12.5 trillion-nearly 400 times more-in loans, loan guarantees and taxpayer subsidies for the sale of risky loans.

Contradictory policies

Only three of the Auto Task Force’s members were notably pro-labor, despite protests from labor and auto-state lawmakers. “The Auto Task Force members are basically red-pencil types who looked at saving the auto industry on the cheap without much consideration to social costs, let alone generating green alternative jobs for auto,” says economist and author William K. Tabb. “They have the narrowest business criteria for auto, unlike the banks that got capital and loan guarantees worth trillions. So their focus was to save the auto companies but not the auto workers.” Essentially, Obama and the task force wanted a quick and cheap solution to the Big Three’s ailing finances rather than providing an endless flow of resources, as the government did to the “too-big-to-fail” financial sector.

Bizarrely, the Auto Task Force’s policy direction dramatically undercuts Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program. “The problem with GM’s new Washington-mandated restructuring plan is that it steps on the gas in the wrong direction,” UC Berkeley professor Harley Shaiken told NPR’s “Marketplace.” “The stimulus package spends $800 billion to create jobs, while billions in loans to GM are conditioned on eliminating them.”

In addition to the factory job and dealership cuts, GM will unload its Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer brands. By contrast, the Italian government provided $1.7 billion in aid to Fiat as long as Italian plants stay open, noted Robert L. Borosage of the progressive coalition Campaign for America’s Future. Also, France loaned $8.5 billion to its big three automakers, in exchange for pledges to keep jobs in France.

Labor advocates fight back

After months of the UAW trying to avoid a fight with Obama, in early May it began openly challenging the use of taxpayer loan money to finance the outsourcing of jobs. “We believe (GM) should have an obligation to build in this country the vehicles it will be selling in the U.S. market, thereby maintaining the maximum number of jobs in the United States,” UAW legislative director Alan Reuther wrote to the Senate.

Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich blasted the notion of paying billions of taxpayer dollars to keep companies afloat while they cut tens of thousands of jobs and wages. “We’re transferring money from taxpayers to Big Three shareholders for no apparent reason other than the Big Three are headquartered in America,” he said. “Why should taxpayers foot any of this bill unless the Big Three agree to keep their workers employed while they try to turn themselves around?”

The full answer to that question remains unanswered at this moment, as the two corporations’ plans for future outsourcing are unavailable. But significantly, the Auto Task Force didn’t explicitly require that federal assistance be directed to renewing production in the United States. Furthermore, following conventional management wisdom, “the Obama administration structured the GM and Chrysler plans to lessen the union’s voice in management,” the New York Times stated.

But so far, the mainstream media hasn’t much noticed or criticized the contradictions between Obama’s plans to simultaneously stimulate job growth and shrink GM and Chrysler. With all the attention on unwarranted Wall Street bonuses, major media lump Wall Street brokers’ compensation and CEO pay with autoworkers wages as part of the same culture of “excess.” Reports that autoworkers were paid as much as $73 an hour quickly spread through the media.

Actually, the typical wage is $26 to $28 an hour, plus an additional $10 or so in benefits, according to the Center for Automotive Research. UAW’s agreement to accept a new starting wage of $14.20 an hour with vastly reduced benefits received little attention. Neither did the fact that UAW-represented plants ranked “very favorably” on quality and productivity compared to Japanese “transplants” in the United States, according to independent industry assessments.

Shielded by a lack of accurate and coherent media analysis, the Auto Task Force used a narrow and conventional single-firm turnaraound framework to create a strategy for GM and Chrysler. “A hedge fund wants to make money fast for its client-in this case, the taxpayer-without regard to social cost,” Shaiken says. “Unlike most clients, however, the taxpayer picks up the social cost. Longer unemployment lines and more foreclosures are devastating for the victims, not cheap for the rest of us.”

But the Auto Task Force seemed largely oblivious to the human costs of eliminating thousands of U.S. auto jobs. Obama and his task force withheld billions of dollars in new loans requested by GM until after the company came up with a more aggressive program of job cuts, plant closing and outsourcing. The Auto Task Force rapidly divorced the reinvigoration of GM and Chrysler from a longer-term shift to a fuel-efficient economy and production not just of high-mileage cars, but also of mass-transit equipment for buses and high-speed rail.

Ironically, GM’s ruthless downsizing of its U.S. workforce and outsourcing of jobs over the last 25 years diminished its leverage with the Obama team. GM has discarded 85 percent of its domestic production since 1990-and that was before it hit the current recession and the resultant nosedive in sales. It was no longer “too big to fail.”

So Obama and the Auto Task Force felt free to promote a recovery strategy for the two ailing auto firms that stands in appalling contrast to the generosity shown Wall Street. GM and Chrysler headquarters will remain intact, but thousands of U.S. workers will be vaporized, retiree health benefits could be put on the chopping block (especially at Chrysler) and numerous industrial communities will suffer permanent damage. And the Obama team has forfeited the opportunity to recast the current crisis into a fuel-efficient re-industrialization of America-right when the country needs the stimulus of  high-wage green jobs the most.

***

• First published in In These Times. To subscribe, click here.

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Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution.

GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American manufacturing plants, terminate 21,000 of its factory workers and double the cars it builds in low-wage Mexico, China and South Korea and ships back to the U.S. to sell.

There it is: GM is demanding that Americans pay to send their own jobs overseas.

In the world where corporate executives live, the one in which boards of directors grant CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses even after companies tank, maybe that’s not a perverse proposition.

But in the world where real Americans live, we’ve had enough of this crap. Decades of foolish tax and other federal policies that encouraged American manufacturing firms to throw Americans out of work and expatriate were bad enough. To expect American taxpayers to bankroll GM’s plans to layoff American workers and move their jobs overseas goes too far.

We’re taking a stand. It’s gotta stop here. The United Steelworkers (USW), the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and the Mayors and Municipalities Automotive Coalition (MMAC) are conducting an 11-state, 32-city protest bus tour. At each stop so far, hundreds of people have cheered our message: “Keep it Made in America.” And they’ve signed our petition calling for support of a simple idea: Buy it here; build it here.      We will present the petitions at a teach-in conference in Washington, D.C. on May 19 when we will explain to elected officials why GM’s plan fails America and why they must require GM to submit a new plan supporting American jobs.

As much as for the UAW, this is a life and death struggle for the USW, American manufacturing, and for millions of Americans in good-paying jobs. Without manufacturing, America is in danger of attempting to subsist on an economy based on nothing more than amorphous derivatives, credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes. The Steelworkers represent hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs depend on the auto industry, from steelworkers who make the steel, to the rubber workers who make the tires, to the glass workers who make the windshields, to the paper workers who make the glossy pamphlets.

Altogether, more than 7 million paychecks depend on the U.S. auto industry, including healthcare, education, service, retail and other jobs. This bus tour is about preserving those jobs, all of those jobs.

In just the past eight months of this recession, caused in huge part by recklessness on Wall Street, this country has lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. GM cannot take tax dollars to slash more. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich agrees. Here’s what he told the Washington Post, “. . . it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of bailing out these big companies. If GM is going to do more of its production overseas, then why exactly are we saving GM?”

It’s not as if it’s impossible for a U.S. auto company to manufacture here. Ford Motor Co., which is not taking any bailout money, is investing $500 million in retooling its Michigan Truck plant outside Detroit so that it can make small cars that it will sell worldwide, including its next-generation, battery-electric Focus. And Chrysler, which is getting bailout money, has made a deal with Fiat under which the Italian car company will manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. assembly facilities, which, along with other long-term commitments, will eventually create 4,000 U.S. jobs.

On the first day of the bus tour, I was joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, actor Danny Glover, the angriest mayor in the U.S., Virg Bernero of Lansing, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, among others.

The Rev. Jackson drew cheers as he remarked that somehow we’ve given billions to the “banksters,” yet somehow we’re still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs and homes each month. He called for a moratorium on foreclosures and plant closings, and I’m with him.

Bernero is tired of Wall Street describing his father, a retired auto worker, as a legacy cost. His father is a human being, a senior citizen, who worked hard every day of his life and returned home exhausted from an honest day’s work. Now, however, Wall Street thinks it’s fine to reduce him to a sub-human term and cheat him out of the retirement benefits he earned.

Bernero’s father made things, real things that could be touched, held in the hand – not derivatives, not figments of the imagination that turned out to have less than no value at all.

Now Wall Street and GM must be made to understand that Main Street isn’t going to take it anymore. We’re not going to continue allowing corporate America to outsource the American dream. Bernero said it right: “This is America’s fight.”

Join us. Sign the petition. We have no intention of buying our own noose. We intend to win this fight.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

The media coverage of the auto bailouts has focused on the need for union autoworkers to take big pay cuts, causing them to once again miss the real story. The Fiat-Chrysler deal shows that the pay problem is at the top, not the bottom. At the end of the day, the new Chrysler is still likely to be producing most of its cars in the United States. What the new company will be getting from abroad is technology and top management.

This big story was so easily missed because it runs against one of the main myths that our elites have cultivated about the US economy: that the country has a “comparative advantage” in highly skilled labor. In this story, the United States will continue to lose manufacturing and other “less-skilled” jobs as its economy becomes more concentrated in highly skilled sectors.

This story was convenient for our elites because it meant that the decline of manufacturing was a necessary, if sometimes painful, part of a natural economic progression. It also justified the growing inequality in US society that benefited not just Wall Street bankers and CEOs, but also millions of doctors, lawyers, economists, and other highly educated workers. These people took their six-figure salaries as a birthright, even as the pay of less educated workers stagnated or declined.

While this story of the US becoming a high skills center in the world economy may have been comforting to the elites, and was widely promoted by economists and the news media, there was never much truth to it. Highly skilled professionals did well in recent decades not because they succeeded in international competition, but rather because they were largely sheltered from it.

Trade agreements like NAFTA were explicitly designed to remove any barrier that made it difficult to export manufacturing goods to the United States, thereby placing US manufacturing workers directly in competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. Most of these restrictions had nothing to do with tariffs. Instead the key issues were rules protecting investment in the developing world along with limits on the ability of the US to exclude imports through safety or environmental regulations.

There has never been any similar effort to eliminate the barriers that prevent professionals from the developing world from coming to the United States and competing directly with their US counterparts as doctors or lawyers or in other highly paid professions.

The economists and the media somehow failed to notice that professionals were intentionally sheltered from international competition and instead just trumpeted them as the winners in the global economy. We were just treated to a beautiful example of this double standard when the media and the economists got all huffy about the “buy America” provision in the stimulus bill that might have protected a few manufacturing jobs in steel and other industries.

While this provision was roundly condemned and eventually watered down, the buy America provision in the Treasury’s latest bank bailout bill went completely unnoticed. This provision requires that any investment manager taking part in the program be headquartered in the United States. Even though the argument against protectionism in financial services is identical to the argument against protectionism in steel, no one bothered to make the argument when Wall Street was the beneficiary of protectionism.

The end result of this protectionism for those at the top is a bloated overpaid sector of top managers, which is what we saw at Chrysler. If we compare wages for assembly-line workers in Europe and the United States, there would not be much difference between the pay of UAW members and their counterparts in Europe. However, there would be a very large difference between the multi-million dollar pay packages of the top executives at the US companies and their European counterparts. The pay gaps persist among the more highly paid engineers and management personnel.

Therefore, it was only logical that a bailout of Chrysler would seek to take advantage of the lower cost management and design skills available at a European car company like Fiat. In Chrysler, as in other companies, the high pay packages for these people are like an anchor dragging them down in international competition. If the US is to be competitive in the 21st century, we must either bring the pay of those at the top back down to earth or we should look to follow the lead of Chrysler and contract out for these services.

Dean Baker is the author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.”

This piece was first published on Huffington Post.

Michael Hiltzik

Watching people desperately trying to hang on to their little all following a disaster is an experience, as Aristotle would have appreciated, certain to excite pity and terror in the human breast.

If only we didn’t have to spend so much time these days watching bankers and corporate executives do it.

Every day seems to present yet another example of the disjunction between the financial community’s sense of entitlement and the real world occupied by everybody else.

The other day, the inspector general for the government’s financial bailout program, known as TARP, revealed that Chrysler’s lending arm requested $750 million in new money but was turned down because its top 25 executives wouldn’t all agree to the compensation limits TARP requires.

That’s after the government had already given Chrysler Financial $1.5 billion. (Chrysler says, for its part, that it decided it didn’t need the additional money after all. Nothing to do with the pay caps, it says. But of the original $1.5 billion, so far it has repaid only $3.5 million.)

Meanwhile, a passel of Wall Street professionals unburdened themselves to New York magazine about the punitive cuts in pay and bonuses they’re suffering — imposed, to their minds, by jealous people less talented and successful than they.  More

This column was first published April 23, 2009 in the Los Angeles Times.