UAW hanging on to false hope

B_starinvestor

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Shifting the burden of healthcare costs over to the UAW in January of '09. How in the hell can the UAW finance this cost?

This is so obvious....didn't we just learn from the meltdown of Wall Street that unsustainable costs and overwhelming, consistent losses put you out of business?

Can someone in Washington step up and just say it? For Chrissakes, the Big 3 have admitted they are finished. The bailout provides nothing more than borrowed time and stall-tactics.

A union-run health care trust known as a voluntary employee benefit association, or VEBA, was supposed to help the automakers escape bankruptcy by capping the amount they would pay for retiree health care expenses. For the retirees, the VEBA was described as insurance against losing retiree health care benefits should the automakers file for bankruptcy. The money would be available for retiree health care regardless of how the automakers fared.

The UAW is scheduled to take over responsibility for providing health benefits to more than 700,000 members and dependents January 1, 2010. Union president Ron Gettelfinger rallied UAW members to support the VEBA in 2007 by saying it would secure retiree health care benefits for the next 80 years. Ghilarducci says that given the current state of the industry, there is a “low probability” that the fund will last that long. Current retirees’ health care benefits were not in doubt, however.

Source: www.workforce.com
 

1BiGG1

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Ron Gettelfinger is a very-rich idiot whose only care about workers is collecting the dues they pay.

When his workers are out of a job like there counterparts in many other industries, he will still be a rich idiot except now living off the huge money he made off the workers in the past.
 

Qua

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No...anyone with half a brain can see the UAW as it stands is the reason the Big 3 are fucked, and people are only now just beginning to admit that maybe that had something to do with it. I've been arguing with some very gung-ho pro-union (read: anti-corporation) types over the past few years. All of a sudden they seemed to get it come September. The UAW is fucked. And the American auto companies are 100% fucked if they let its dilapidated, bloat inducing agenda continue.

My dad called to get some lab tests done the other day. The guy told him it wasn't part of his UAW-bartered job description and that he couldn't do them. He was bald-faced lying, using the idea that management should shake in its boots if the UAW blinks. And using it to get out of work he was supposed to do. I know that's the most micro-level example possible, but I find it rather illustrative of how dysfunctional the UAW/American Auto marriage has become.
 

houtx48

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If this comes to pass the uaw brought it on the american worker, i don't understand why the auto companies kept caving to the demands. after wwii the US still had all it manufacturing plants online while europe and japan was in shambles, well now it's 70 years later and all is rebuilt but the US never really changed the way they did business, they just shipped it off. This whole thing might be a good thing it'll make everyone wake up and not just the auto makers.