Union Heft

What a conundrum for any country, much less one obliged to the automotive industry for a significant proportion of its manufacturing and export and employment stability. The Big Three automakers of the United States, with its branch manufactories in Canada, has, in the past, been responsible, particularly in Ontario, for presenting as a signal industry employing a large labour pool, one that produced saleable products and enhanced the bottom line of both the province and the country.

This has also been an industry that hasn't kept apace with foreign standards of quality production, one that was wedded to its own unassailable sub-standards, inclusive of poor engineering and built-in obsolescence. Its well-earned reputation for shoddy workmanship, sub-prime engineering and product unreliability is what, largely, has placed it in the squeezed position it finds itself today. Foreign auto makers from Japan and Korea whose reliable and quality products informed automotive owners that they'd made the right choice, out-performed the Big Three in their home market.

Little difference it makes now that in the last several years domestic automakers have seen the light and instituted a higher degree of quality control, had their engineers and designers produce more reliable products of an improved calibre than previously; their degraded reputation lives on. They've been an important and stabilizing factor, for all their faults, in the industrial heartland of the country for many decades. Bringing along with them a thriving automotive parts industry.

Now all of it set to collapse with the near collapse of the industry itself. Turning tens of thousands of industry employees out of their secure, nicely padded- and-remunerated positions as factory workers. They're bidding for more time to get a grip on the problems they themselves have engineered, now more than ever critical to their survival in the face of a global financial turndown complemented by a slowdown in purchasing power, with fewer potential buyers on the near horizon.

They're overstocked in inventory and cannot move their vehicles in a market that's suddenly shut down as people hunker in for an unpleasantly long and painful economic recovery, unwilling to commit funds they aren't certain they can sustain in hefty car payments. People whose own questionable employment stability haunts their every waking hour. And the automakers have gone, cap in hand, to the U.S. and Canadian governments, appealing to them to open their treasuries to keep them afloat.

A little while longer, until they're no longer fiscally tenable, and final closures occur, anyway? Until they declare bankruptcy, and slowly, painfully, at least two of the three may be capable of restructuring and rising again like the fabled Phoenix? Humiliated in the marketplace, but somewhat wiser in the design and production of product lines that people will commit to? More leery of signing rich union contracts that in the final analysis have helped lead to their demise?

The Canadian public, like its counterpart in the United States, the home country of the Big Three, is anything but enthralled at the prospect of their hard-earned tax funding going to the support of the automakers. After all, if we respond to their need, then why not Nortel, why not the forestry industry, and any number of other struggling industries actually based and home-grown in the country, giving employment to more hundreds of thousands of Canadians?

It isn't as though the government of Canada hasn't, in the past, been generous in offering tax breaks, incentives and loans to the automakers. But the governments of both the country and the province have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they've scant other options, and in concert with a reluctant U.S. Congress, must offer some support. Federal Industry Minister Tony Clement and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty are struggling with a $2.8-billion loan to complement that of the U.S.'s commitment to the longevity of the automakers.

And while the American Autoworkers Union has agreed to some concessions as a sacrifice to the greater good of saving American jobs, Ken Lewenza of the Canadian Autoworkers Union is adamant that no concessions should be looked for by his members. The pure gold of their contract of rich hourly wages and benefits far outweighing those of any other industry standards are precisely responsible for much of the financial quandary the Big Three now find themselves struggling with.

Active employees in the industry are outnumbered by retirees, basking in the surety of their privileged retirement incomes, through the extreme generosity of their pensions, alongside other benefits. Autoworkers in Canada number roughly 27,000, while retirees number 40,000. What industry could logically support such an imbalance of wealth-deriving against wealth-depriving economies?

It seems it's quite all right for the taxpaying public to make the sacrifice of lending out financing in a last-ditch effort to stabilize a faltering trio of employers who may just, despite the loans, still default and leave the taxpayers holding worthless pay-back promises. Quite another entirely for unionized employees, most of whom earn salaries lavish by comparison to most other Canadians, to sacrifice something meaningful.

Moreover, Mr. Lewenza has the unmitigated gall to castigate the two governments for their bail-out offer; not enough, in his estimation. The amount should at least be doubled, in his view. Union heft equates with union theft of taxpayer funding.