THE AUTOEXTREMIST

July 14, 2010

The Shit Disturber Cometh.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

(Posted 7/13, 11:00AM) Detroit. Many months ago, long before Ron Gettelfinger retired as the President of the United Auto Workers union, I predicted that Bob King - the clear heir apparent - had the potential to set back all of the conciliatory, somewhat progressive, and decidedly more realistic discussions and agreements that had marked the union movement at the end of Gettelfinger’s reign. I also suggested that King would go out of his way to blow-up any of this “enlightened” thinking - and of course the reduced union contracts - the ones that fundamentally pressed the “reset” button for the Detroit automakers and allowed them to survive the economic crisis relatively intact while armed with a new competitiveness, in about fifteen minutes or so.

Unfortunately for all of us who are in this business and in this industry - and particularly in this town, state and region - it looks like Bob King’s 15 minutes are at hand. And make no mistake, this is the most unfortunate scenario that could unfold and the biggest bowl of Not Good headed this industry’s way since this nation’s financial crisis itself.

While being subjected to King’s hairball pronouncements and his belligerent demeanor right out of the gate – the tone of which is clearly punctuated by his blind ambition and his uncanny ability to studiously avoid the realities of the modern day global economy at every turn – it’s clear that this guy is a “throwback” to an uglier, much more confrontational era. An era that saw the domestic auto industry acquiesce to a constantly escalating series of demands by the UAW while effectively being held at gunpoint, knowing that if they didn’t “cave” then the gravy train of profitability would be over, even though with each corrosive agreement the table was being set for the bankruptcies that unfolded by the end of 2008.

Forty years of UAW belligerence - compounded by the domestic automakers steadfast unwillingness to put the brakes on the insanity - led this industry down the primrose path to the Abyss, and it damn near meant the destruction of one of the key pillars of this nation’s manufacturing base.

Yes, the domestic automakers were more than culpable, what with their refusal to believe that 1. Anyone else in the world could build a decent car, and 2. Even if they did manage to build something decent, American consumers wouldn’t want anything to do with them.

And we all know how that turned out.

Not only did American consumers embrace the imports in droves, an entire generation walked away from the Detroit Three’s run of slipshod or nonexistent quality vehicles, never to return.

But the UAW didn’t do themselves any favors by making it their mission to consistently ignore the big picture. When it was suggested that the import manufacturers build plants here to help “level the playing field,” that’s exactly what they did, and except for a few glaring instances – NUMMI in California to be exact – the imports avoided the myriad negatives associated with the UAW by ignoring the issue altogether, running non-union plants and making no bones about it. And as the Detroit Three struggled mightily to make money - while being hamstrung with crippling UAW labor agreements - the import manufacturers made even more strides with American consumers, and slowly but surely the domestic automakers saw their share of the market plummet in a continuous downward spiral for the last 25 years.

Then again we know all of this. And I get the fact that King is trying to mark his territory by dusting off the hoary rhetoric from yesteryear in order to get his constituency juiced for the long fight ahead, blah-blah-blah.

But what’s going on this time is different.

Bob King isn’t just dusting off the old rhetoric to generate sound bites for the content-starved hordes in the media; he actually believes the time is right to bomb this industry back to the Stone Age, effectively bringing back the notorious UAW “entitlement” mentality of less work/more pay + benefits with a resounding chorus of “What’s in it for us?” thrown in for old time’s sake.

King’s first offensive aimed at getting back to the bad-old days is to start “informational” picketing at Toyota dealerships – specifically in California but watch for it to spread quickly to other media-visible states – in order to strong-arm Toyota into allowing the unionization of its U.S. plants and to protest Toyota's decision to close its NUMMI plant in Fremont, California, which was closed when GM – Toyota’s partner in the manufacturing facility – went bankrupt.

Not long after Toyota closed NUMMI, it resumed finishing construction of a new facility in Blue Springs, Mississippi, about 200 miles northeast of Jackson - which had been put on hold when the economy slowed - where it will build Corollas, without union labor, of course. This seems to have rankled Mr. King to no end and he just can’t seem to fathom why Toyota would do such a thing.

But given all of the negative evidence pointing to the inherent drawbacks of UAW involvement accrued over the years, why would Toyota consider doing it any other way? So now King is now even more hell-bent on “converting” Toyota’s facilities in the U.S. to become UAW plants.

Memo to Bob King: It’s notgonnahappen.com. Not in this lifetime, or any other lifetime either. That the ship has sailed on the union movement in this country is apparently news only to the old hands clinging to the past at the UAW. Yes, the union movement once served a purpose in the development of industrial America, but that was so long ago that no one currently involved with the UAW can separate the historical facts of that era from the modern day distortions stemming from the union’s warped reality that has been going on for four decades now.

The “entitlement” mantra gleefully idolized by the anointed, hand-holding minions in the UAW became obsolete the moment Toyota and Honda first established their assembly plants in this country. And the death-knell for the UAW – and for the soon to be woefully out-of-touch domestic automakers – was sealed from that moment on too.

But that Bob King is tone deaf to the nuances of the global - and national - reality shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. After all, this guy’s roots are deeply embedded in the UAW’s past. A past fueled by grandstanding histrionics and a maliciously calculated and confrontational intransigence. So it’s no wonder that he’s come out with guns blazing, sounding for all the world like a guy lost in a permanent fog of irrelevance.

What could Bob King do to become even more irrelevant, if that’s possible?

As hard as it is to believe, King is now throwing in his lot with - speaking of grandstanding histrionics - one Rev. Jesse Jackson. You know Jackson as the guy who seems to show up - Zelig-like - whenever there’s a whiff of controversy in need of his “talents.” What you probably don’t know is that this guy has made a career out of shaking down corporate America in the guise of “justice” and “equality” – with the unspoken threat of playing the race card to the media if he isn’t able to extract the amount of the “donation” he wants.

These two blowhards are taking their respective organizations – the UAW and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition – and forming a coalition along with other various unions and organizations to fight for urban revitalization, fair trade and jobs. They’re even organizing a march in Detroit on August 28 to kick-off the campaign for “jobs, justice, and peace.”

Perfect, isn’t it?

In the midst of crawling out of the rubble of two bankruptcies - and trying to make Detroit’s products desirable again - while dealing with the perpetual din of negativity in national media stories about this industry and this city, here comes Bob King doing a pitch-perfect impression of a UAW leader from 1970, with Jesse Jackson trundling along for the ride in case there’s need for hysteria and custom-delivered, agitating sound bites.

How is this helpful? How - after all that has transpired in this industry over the last 24 months - can projecting to the rest of the country that this miserable excuse for a “union” is still involved in the Detroit Three’s fortunes going to get people to view Detroit – and its cars and trucks – in a different light?

I’ll answer that one for you: It won’t.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.

See another live episode of "Autoline After Hours" hosted by Autoline Detroit's John McElroy, with Peter De Lorenzo and friends this Thursday evening, at 7:00PM EDT at www.autolinedetroit.tv.

By the way, if you'd like to subscribe to the Autoline After Hours podcasts, click on the following links:

Subscribe via iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311421319

Subscribe via RSS:

http://www.autolinedetroit.tv/podcasts/feeds/afterhours-audio.xml