Mar-Apr 2006

Some say take the low road. The UAW rejects that strategy because no matter how low you go, some other country will go lower – not only in wages, but also in safety conditions, human rights and environmental standards.

Inaction is not an option

The following is taken from President Ron Gettelfinger’s recent speech to the 2006 Automotive News World Congress.

Over the years, jobs in the auto industry have enabled millions of hard-working men and women to move into the middle class and give their children not just more things but more opportunities.

There are some who say those days are over – that the very idea of decent wages, health care and retirement security for workers has been rendered obsolete by the harsh realities of globalization.

They argue that the only way to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States is to slash the wages of American workers to near poverty level.

In other words, take the low road.

The UAW rejects that strategy because no matter how low you go, some other country will go lower – not only in wages, but also in safety conditions, human rights and environmental standards.

Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, tells of meeting two young women who worked at an automotive parts plant. Their plant was relatively new, with up-to-date technology and equipment. Productivity and quality were high. Labor-management relations were good.

One morning the workers were brought together and told they had priced themselves out of the market, and their jobs were moving to China.

This plant was in Tijuana, and these workers were making $1 an hour.

As Shaiken noted, globalization is creating a new reality for workers: Instead of high productivity prosperity, the race to the bottom is creating high productivity poverty.

The question becomes this: Is globalization an irresistible force of nature beyond our power to shape and control? It isn’t.

It is the result of conscious choices by government and corporate policymakers around the world. And, in our view, U.S. policymakers have made a number of wrong choices.

No matter if we are a Democrat, Republican or an Independent, we have to ask ourselves: How can anyone reasonably claim that U.S. trade policy is working when it has produced year after year of record trade deficits?

The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services for 2004 was $617.6 billion – or nearly $1.9 billion a day.

And the trade deficit for 2005 was projected to reach $740 billion – nearly $200 billion in automotive trade alone.

We spend far more of our Gross Domestic Product ($1.9 trillion) and far more per person on health care than any other country.

Yet nearly 46 million Americans don’t have any health insurance and millions more are underinsured. And for many of those with insurance, premiums are skyrocketing while coverage is being cut.

And for all our health care spending, the United States ranks near the bottom among industrialized nations on life expectancy, infant mortality and virtually every other measure. In fact, the infant mortality rate in our nation’s capital is more than double the infant mortality rate in Beijing.

Prescription drugs cost more in the United States than in any other country.

Obviously, our free enterprise system is not working when it comes to America’s health care crisis. Some people say the answer is more market competition in health care.

We’ve already tried that and it doesn’t work.

The agreements the UAW recently reached with General Motors and Ford Motor Co. to lower retiree health care costs were a painful and difficult decision for our union.

And it was done only after an in-depth, careful analysis of the companies’ finances.

By giving up a pay increase, our active members showed their commitment to stand by our retirees – on whose shoulders all of us stand.

We have repeatedly said America’s health care costs crisis can’t be solved by one union or one industry.

It can’t be solved at the collective-bargaining table.

And it can’t be solved by employers slashing health care coverage for active workers or eliminating retiree heath care coverage.

Inaction is not an option. Instead, government, labor and corporate America need to work together to come up with new approaches to make at least incremental progress on health care costs in the near term.

The UAW believes the American Dream is about the hopes and aspirations that we all share for future generations.

It is a dream we will not give up on – not for our members and not for the American people.