Advance the money as a loan to the UAW in return for commitments to higher energy standards and working towards oil independence. Let American workers reap the profits from their own blood, sweat and tears instead of some lazy CEO who never saw a resource he couldn’t exploit.
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This is exactly the approach planned by long time UAW President Walter Reuther but unfortunately never happened due to his untimely death in a plane crash in 1970. Reuther actually proposed this joint ownership between the UAW and GM to the GM management and it was rejected out of hand by GM. The alternative Reuther decided upon was to use the huge UAW pension fund to buy up shares in GM to eventually achieve his perspective of joint ownership and joint management in GM. Unfortunately after Reuther’s death, successive UAW leadership did not safeguard these funds and they were bled off by outside non-union interests.
Reuther wanted to improve the union beyond just being a “nickle in the envelope” instrument for bargaining with the company. He felt that joint ownership between management and labor would vastly improve all functions throughout the company from the boardroom to the manufacturing floor, as both management and labor would be driven to make the company as profitable as possible. From his perspective joint ownership was the only pathway to joint management.
The Republican minority is first and foremost anti-union, so it will take a hard sell to get them approve a loan of sufficient size to enable the UAW to purchase enough equity in GM so as to constitute joint ownership.
I watched both the Senate and House hearings and the blame heaped on the 3 CEO’s by members of these committees was well deserved. These guys showed up without any plans as to how the 25 billion would be used to help restructure their respective companies. They didn’t even have any idea how the 25 billion would be split between the 3 companies. They fumbled around tossing out numbers that at times did not even add up to 25 billion. When the Senators uncovered the lack of preparedness to testify before Congress by the 3 CEO’s, the day was lost for the 25 billion request. Further, the President of the UAW also had no plan and was just as unprepared as the CEO’s. The business plan that the Congress wanted to see would be SPECIFIC individually to each manufacturer. The plan for EACH CORPORATION must include the domestic balance sheet, the offshore or international business balance sheet, current and future retooling costs, current and short term future labor costs, insurance costs and projected pension load. Due to the vast complexity of the interactive data, the graphics of such a plan should be in the form of a PERT chart.