It's A Dumb Deal

Most assuredly it's that, and it's also, now a done deal. For the United States, the auto industry has been tossed a life-line for the short order of the near future, with a number of provisos it must live up to. For Canada, our share of the Big Three automakers' future positioning and job-production was announced jointly by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Canada would assume a 20% burden of offering tax dollars from the country's treasury to lift General Motors of Canada and Chrysler Canada out of the dumps their inferior product production has leveraged them into. There are certain expectations incumbent on the automakers for the rare privilege of a Conservative-led government agreeing to loosen tax dollars to ensure they remain here, employing Canadians.

The gratefulness of the automakers is persuasive to a degree, but does not assuage the deep suspicion that most Canadians greet the bail-out with. For it's fairly universal, the expectation that, despite the hand-up, despite the sincere promises to tighten expenditures and begin to produce reliable vehicles that people can rely on, the companies will ultimately fail to pull themselves out of insolvency.

The result? Chapter 11 in the U.S., bankruptcy declarations in Canada. The nomenclature may vary, the results are alarmingly similar. The funding that came with a pay-back offer worthy of an honest loan, will disappear into thin air, and the taxpayer will be left, bemused, holding the bag. This is definitely not seen to be in the best interests of the country as a whole.

Nice for those whose jobs depend on it, but it's a stop-gap measure at best. Besides which, we're talking about an industry whose unions have been able to wrest concessions worthy of the elites of the business world, not of factory workers. The remuneration of autoworkers is at least twice that of most workers, far more than that of service workers. And we're increasingly a service-oriented workforce.

So how does it make sense that someone earning $20, $30, or $40 an hour should assume the responsibility of saving factory jobs earning $70 an hour? Particularly when those workers earning in the rage of $20 to $40 an hour are increasingly losing their own jobs? No one is lining up representing government coffers to give them a lift out of their unemployment misery.

Entitle one industry to expect government largess, and then prepare to explain to any number of other worthy industries like mining, forestry, fishing, technology, that it is only the auto industry that qualifies for this kind of assistance, not they. What kind of sense does that make? Little wonder that the majority of Canadians across the country reject the necessity to bail out the auto industry.

It benefits, for one thing, the Province of Ontario. Which handily explains why Canadians living elsewhere are rather less than enthusiastic about the bail-out. Yet even in Ontario, it's only a slight majority that will agree to the perceived necessity of helping the automakers get through the next few months to redirect themselves toward salvation through restructuring.

What's taken them so long? They've been producing built-in obsolescence for generations. It's only the irrationality of sloppy-minded fealty to a "North American-built" product that has kept them going for far longer than they deserve. When the reality was that their engineering and product-quality was clearly inferior to that of imports from Japan.

Adding insult to injury has been the daily full-page advertising undertaken by General Motors to boost their bleary image in the reading public's esteem by boasting of the mechanical and design prowess of their inferior vehicles. Now the die is cast, the deed is done, and we can sit back and watch while they become truly undone.

Can't blame the government entirely; the media and the automakers have been trumpeting disaster, promising the unthinkable; the loss of a half-million auto-making-related jobs in the country. The pressure is on, people have been panicking in an already-frantic financial environment; whether or not it expresses reality, it expresses a general perception of need.

And then there's another reality, the Canadian Auto Workers' Ken Lewenza's warning that his members are not prepared to agree to any wage or benefit sacrifices. Their $70-an-hour wages rather eclipse those of Honda and Toyota workers set at $45 an hour. And while the union is refusing to relent on wages, they'll be expected to give something back.

Other perquisites, like paying workers' legal bills at house buying; scholarship funds and charitable causes. And the Special Paid Absence days workers receive over and above sick leave and paid vacation days. The rich employee costs of Canadian autoworkers with the Big Three don't help to move the companies toward future viability.

Much as the union protests and denies and struggles, reality is that the Canadian taxpayer represented by hundreds of thousands whose own jobs have been forfeit by the downed economy aren't the only ones who will have to make sacrifices.