COMMENTARY: UAW to Organize Toyota? Not Likely
By Michelle Krebs July 15, 2010Newly-minted president Bob King is trying to revive an ailing United Auto Workers union by 
vowing anew to organize Toyota's U.S. factories, a campaign that has as much chance of success as King being invited to perform card tricks at Toyota's next board of directors meeting.
King, one of the best thinkers to lead the UAW, surely realizes that Toyota's U.S. workers, having watched the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler on top of wage concessions at UAW plants, have scant reason to welcome the union. The UAW since the 1980s has failed to elicit the interest of Toyota workers, who now have benefitted because their employer avoided layoffs as the U.S. automotive downturn slowed and idled plants.
Toyota poses a convenient target for King's rhetoric because the automaker has been weakened by its excoriation at the hands of the federal government as a result of an unintended acceleration uproar that also cost it prestige and sales. The Obama administration can't say a formal ``amen'' to a UAW organizing campaign, though it won't mind a bit if the UAW further disrupts Toyota's business, since every lost sale is a potential gain for U.S.-subsidized GM.
Some U.S. manufacturers have learned plenty from the innovative way Toyota manages its factories. The UAW, born in militancy, has no intention of changing its culture to one of cooperation or collaboration. The UAW rank-and-file demands a strong, adversarial stance against management. Any UAW leader who forgets this fundamental truth will pay a political price to more radical union elements who are furious that the union granted financial concessions to Detroit automakers in return for the rescue by the U.S. Treasury last year.
King's threats to Toyota also are designed to remind the leaders of the Detroit Three and their suppliers that the UAW will be back to tough bargaining if and when prosperity returns - to regain the union's share of the spoils. - Doron Levin, Contributing Writer
Doron Levin has been reporting on business and financial subjects from Detroit, specializing in the global auto industry since 1984. He has been a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, bureau chief of The New York Times, and a columnist for the Detroit Free Press and Bloomberg. He is the author of two books, "Irreconcilable Differences: Ross Perot vs General Motors" and "Behind the Wheel at Chrysler: the Iacocca Legacy."
Photo by UAW
Bob King was named the UAW's new president in June.
LEAVE A COMMENT
I really hope Toyota workers reject them. Unions, especially auto-related unions, have completely outlived their usefulness in my opinion.
Sadly, there are still instances where unions are still needed because of ridiculous management practices. The auto business is not one of those instances. What's truly ironic is that the UAW and its more radical elements are now the "greedy fat-cat owners" that they have so long fought against (as well as management). As shareholders in both GM and Chrysler (and through the newly minted VEBA, Ford), they are in essence fighting themselves. What they also fail to realize is that, for most public companies, the majority of shares are held by institutional investors, which are the large state pension funds and other mutuals funds out there. Basically, average middle-class people are controlling shareholders, not a small number of very rich people. Some of these funds, like CALPERS, have started to realize this and are no longer acting as passive shareholders. But the UAW continues to act as if their employers are owned by a small number of very rich elite who are trying to extract every last penny on the back of "the oppressed worker". All these stances do is end up doing is hurting their own pensions and savings by trying to "get all they can now".
ADD A COMMENT