Isn’t Newt right? Autoblog sneers at Newt Gingrich for suggesting that the UAW was partly responsible for the decline of Detroit. Here’s a report on what Gingrich said:
“It’s a work-rules problem; it’s not an hourly cost problem,” he told a Rotary Club breakfast meeting. “You can’t have continuous improvement if you’re not allowed to constantly modify and improve.”
Autoblog‘s Jeff Sabatini responded:
[W]e wouldn’t expect Gingrich to behave any differently towards his political enemies in the union, we will say that the loss of manufacturing jobs is a far more complicated subject than this or any other soundbite can explain. And for all the attention that the auto industry continues to receive from politicians hoping to score points with voters, we remain appalled at how little those on both sides of the aisle actually know about the business.
It’s the always-persuasive “We know too much to explain it to you” argument!” Why not give explaining it a try? To us uninformed voters, what Gingrich said seems inarguably true: the UAW’s work and seniority rules have been an impediment to Japan-style continuous improvement (see, e.g., this NPR story on GM’s Fremont and South Gate plants). That conflict seems inevitable, since work rules freeze existing production arrangements while “continuous change” disrupts them.In any case, two of the three UAW-organized auto manufacturers have gone broke. None of the big nonunion manufacturers has. That makes a strong prima facie case that the UAW is at least a major factor, no? Sabatini doesn’t try to rebut this with anything other than attitude.
I’m willing to accept mindless, snotty pro-labor bias in my news sources, but not in my automotive porn sites. …