Brush With Death

The American auto industry looks to be on the verge of collapsing faster than an abandoned mansion in Detroit's Brush Park neighborhood. After some Republican senators, many of those from Southern states with foreign auto plants, blocked a bill to give the automakers a loan, General Motors began making contingency plans, and the United Auto Workers union flatly claimed that the bill's opponents were out to bust the union. I've been listening to both sides of the argument, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans opposed to this bill, knowing the jig is up for the Grand Old Party, are indeed out to claim one last victory for predatory capitalism by breaking America's last great industrial union, but Richard Shelby of Alabama should be given the benefit of the doubt, if only because he didn't think the Wall Street bailout was a great idea, either.

It is true that the autoworkers enjoy benefits and perks not offered to American employees of foreign plants, or any other American workers in general. But many of these benefits - health care, for example - would not be necessary if we had meaningful government reform of the social safety net, health insurance especially. The automakers were known for their unsavory practices against their own employees back in the early twentieth century, and a strong union helped end that. While Toyota and Nissan are hardly as unfair to their own American employees, bear in mind that early union victories in the early days of the auto industry improved working conditions in American car plants and even right-to-work factories owned by foreign companies hold to many of those standards.

Is this the last hurrah for industrial unions as well as the American auto industry? Hardly. Obama's election may have been a great awakening of the labor movement. Look at what happened at the window and door factory in Chicago! All of those laid-off workers, many of them Hispanic, were denied the severance and vacation pay they were entitled to and successfully got it with a sit-in.

As for the automakers. . . . George Walker Bush now says he may reverse his earlier stand and give GM, Chrysler, and, if it needs it, Ford a loan to tide them over through January out of the $700 billion financial bailout money.

Bush may have finally found a positive legacy. He may save Detroit.