Workers' words

Tom Brune

Tom Brune, UAW Local 2250, General Motors' Wentzville (Mo.) Assembly Plant

(Editor's note: This article was written in response to a June 7 opinion piece in The Washington Post by columnist George F. Will.)

Dear George Will (and other so-called auto industry experts), I am a 49-year-old GM employee and member of UAW Local 2250 in Wentzville, Mo.

As you might expect, things are tough around here and people are despondent as layoffs loom. There is no shortage of automotive armchair quarterbacks, as the daily drumbeat of misinformation, and in some cases vitriol, spews forth all around us.

Try to imagine coming to work and doing a demanding assembly line job with no margin for error, working virtually nonstop, all the while getting kicked in the teeth by people who haven't the slightest clue what it takes to produce an automobile.

People who have rarely, if ever, written about the industry are now suddenly experts of all they survey, declaring as you did, for example: "It is reasonable to assume that GM will become profitable – if you make unreasonable assumptions about annual vehicle sales and GM's share of the market."

What is reasonable and how do you know? Do you bother to report what those assumptions are and the reasoning behind them? Don't op-ed pieces require at least some representation of facts to support a position?

You ridicule President Barack Obama for being "determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes." The nerve of this man, looking out for middle-class workers who still produce things of value with their hands.

What's next? Health care for all?

And the UAW wanting to keep manufacturing jobs supported by taxpayer loans in the United States? Ridiculous! If someone can do the job cheaper – because they sure can't do it better – you feel they should get the work.

Who wins in this race to the bottom and what kind of economy does that produce for this country? Can we all be bankers, lawyers, teachers, health care providers, waiters and clerks?

All of these professions depend on the same thing: someone else's money.

I'm no economist, but doesn't someone have to produce something tangible of value to feed this chain of service providers? And don't those producers need to make enough money to pay for these services?

We need to sell more vehicles to turn our business around, but the buying public is continually bombarded by negative pieces such as yours. For the record, GM and Toyota are dead even in auto assembly productivity, according to the latest Harbour Report on manufacturing efficiency, the industry bible on such matters.

Our quality is on a par with the best Asian manufacturers and better than most European ones, and Buick recently supplanted Lexus at the top of the J.D. Power and Associates reliability studies.

If that were the refrain, maybe the public would be more amenable to trying our products, which is all we really ask.

A perfect example is the Chevy Malibu. It was picked as Car of the Year over the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, is the top mid-size sedan in initial quality, according to J.D. Power, and is still outsold about 2-1 by both of these models despite having a lower price, a better warranty and buyer protection.

Trust me when I tell you that I am firmly in the middle class because of GM and the UAW. And trust me when I tell you that people working the assembly line earn every penny they make. No, it's often not mentally challenging in the same sense as, say, writing an opinion piece. But it's challenging because you have to stay focused doing a task that has to be done flawlessly thousands of times a week, and because our customers demand it.

It would be very refreshing if just one journalist dared to work the assembly line before criticizing those who do.

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