Soon we'll just have public employee unions, where they can collect dues and use them to support politicians who will be overseeing public employment ...
Huh ?
Unions Pay Dearly for Success - New York Times:
"Want to hear some good news for the labor movement? The percentage of American workers who are union members remained almost steady in the private sector last year.
The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's.
Even worse for labor, the rate of unionization has further to fall, according to most labor economists and experts in industrial relations. 'In the immediate future, unions will carry on shriveling in the private sector,' said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard. "
Then there is this bit by good friend Mike Gorman :
(which is in reply to Mel Ravitz: GM gets it wrong again Automaker had opportunity to institute single-payer health care)
Don't Blame GM
Don't blame GM
I take issue with the Mel J. Ravitz Other Voices piece published Jan. 15 in The Ann Arbor News. Ravitz characterizes General Motors Corp. as targeting its own workers and retirees regarding pensions and health care costs.
Let us look at some facts.
In 1948-50, GM first began to offer health care and retirement benefits to its represented workers. The retirement age was 65; life expectancy was 68. There were about 7.2 workers age 20-64 in the U.S. workforce for each person over 65. The proportion now is less than 5:1 and will drop below 3:1 within the next 20 years.
There were no such things as MRIs, CT scans, angioplasties, pacemakers, AIDS, organ transplants, or computerized prostheses. Total U.S. health care expenditures in 1950 were about $70 billion and a modest percentage of GDP; in 2003 that had risen to $1.7 trillion and a shocking 15.3% of GDP.
Ravitz goes on to suggest that if only GM had educated Congress, our lawmakers would have taken the burden off the shoulders of the corporation and distributed that burden equitably over all taxpayers.
History offers little record of such congressional initiative.
The fact that workers are living dramatically longer in retirement and utilizing new and more costly medical interventions both during and beyond their productive years does not reflect poorly on GM, the UAW, or Congress. However, the fact pattern does change the funding assumptions necessary to provide benefits. If the life span in retirement grows from both ends through earlier retirement and later death additional funds must be obtained.
If that funding were to come from shorting new product development, skimping on product content or abandoning plant investment and maintenance, the impact on GM's ability to produce the desirable products essential to success would be very negative.
If GM were in a position to increase its margins by raising prices, perhaps it would be able to continue indefinitely to provide more-costly benefits for longer life spans. However, those margins are pressed by competitors who do not pay pensions and health care for retirees and families based on U.S. cost levels. Even those transplant manufacturers employing U.S. assemblers have the advantage of a younger workforce and negligible retiree population.
I agree with Ravitz that we need a more balanced approach to providing health care and to funding retirement living. I do not think he has made the case that GM is somehow the villain. I see GM as a company struggling mightily to meet its obligations to all its stakeholders. GM products have shown dramatic improvements in recent years, and the continued success of GM has been instrumental to the prosperity of people in Southeast Michigan as no other public or private organization.
As I see it, GM has not targeted its workers: Rather, it has helped to contribute materially to the circumstances leading to the longer lives and earlier retirements that have led us all to the present predicament. Only a successful GM can sustain such largesse.
News readers can contribute essays of general interest to Other Voices. Please call Mary Morgan, Opinion editor, at (734) 994-6605 or e-mail mmorgan@annarbornews.com
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