Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Big 3 -- A Microcosm
I was against the bailout of the Big 3 until I read a column that agreed with me. Huh? The columnist started out with how the Government had no place using tax dollars to prop up unprofitable businesses. OK, I can buy that. He then attributed the failure of the Big 3 to, what else, the Evil Union. What was the Union's crime? Securing pensions, and especially health care, for its members. If this is true, then the plight of the Big 3 is really about major challenges facing our society. And the bailout is a lot more gray to me.
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2 comments:
As an employee of one of the Big Three, I am definitely following this story with interest. On the one hand, I don't think my particular company necessarily needs a loan right now, and I am queasy about the idea of the government picking winners and losers. On the other hand, if the other guy does not get a loan and declares bankruptcy, that could end up dragging my company down with his, due largely to our common supply base.
In the end, I guess what I'm hoping for is some sort of "soft landing" in which a merger or some other event occurs which takes some excess capacity out of the automotive market without totally nuking my company in the process. To that end, I'm hoping a bridge loan might enable that process to happen in a more controlled and less catastrophic way.
The joke I've heard repeatedly is that GM is a health and retirement benefits company that happens to make cars on the side.
Blaming the unions for that situation sounds like a fatuous argument to me, but I'm predisposed to be pro-union and also generally feel it's too complex a system for there to be a simple scapegoat.
Regardless of the blame, I've heard an argument that implementing a national health care system (of whatever type) would have the ancillary benefit of taking such a huge liability off the manufacturing industry's balance sheet that it could make a lot of companies competitive again on the world market.
Dunno if that kind of solution is just as predicated on an ulterior political goal as the anti-union blame is.
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