What’s
Wrong Today:
The New York Times reports
that employees at the Chattanooga, TN Volkswagen plant voted 712 to 626 on
Friday against joining the United Automobile Workers Union.
The NYT quotes Mike
Jarvis, a VW employee who works on the finishing line:
at what happened to the auto manufacturers in Detroit and how they struggled.
They all shared one huge factor: the UAW…If you look at how the UAW’s
membership has plunged, that shows they’re doing a lot wrong
His belief was that the
UAW had hurt Detroit’s automakers and killed Detroit. He may have been persuaded by Republican
politicians in Tennessee as well as some outside conservative groups, who made
sure that the plant’s workers heard plenty of anti-union arguments.
- Governor
Bill Haslam, (R), warned that auto part suppliers would not locate in the
Chattanooga area if the plant was unionized
- Sen.
Bob Corker (R-TN) said Volkswagen executives had told him that the plant would
add a new production line, making SUVs, if the workers rejected the UAW
- State
Senator Bo Watson (R), who represents a suburb of Chattanooga, warned that the
Republican-controlled legislature was unlikely to approve further subsidies to
Volkswagen if the workers embraced the UAW, a threat that might discourage the
company from expanding. Mr. Watson also attacked Volkswagen for taking a neutral-to-positive stance
toward the UAW saying its approach was:
- Grover
Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, helped underwrite a new group, the Center for
Worker Freedom that put up 13
billboards in Chattanooga, warning that the city might become the next Detroit
if the workers voted for the union
Perhaps this pressure
made the majority of workers believe that they were voting in their own interest
by rejecting union membership. Mr. Corker had asserted that a union victory
would make Volkswagen less competitive and hurt workers’ living standards.
Volkswagen said that
it was neutral on the union vote, although they wished to implement a German-style works
council, a committee of managers and blue-collar and white-collar workers who
develop factory policies, on issues like work schedules and vacations.
Volkswagen, which has unions and works councils at all of its 105 other plants
worldwide, views such councils as crucial for improving morale and cooperation
and increasing productivity.
US Labor law experts say it would be illegal for VW to have a works council
unless workers first voted to have a union.
What we have here is the triumph
of political marketing over union marketing. Did the politicians interfere with
what is arguably an internal company issue; whether to organize a company
union? That will be decided over the next few weeks as the UAW looks at whether
it can file and win an NLRB complaint alleging improper influence over the
voting process.
Perhaps Charles Pierce
summed up the Tennessee situation best when he tweeted:
people vote to be powerless, even when their employers want to help empower
them, there’s really no place to go. #uaw
Broadening
this out, the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening in
America is a big cop-out. Who is responsible if we as individuals are not
responsible? Should we simply blame the moneyed interests? Ian
Welsh observed last December that the reason America can’t have nice things
is, well, Americans:
attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s
happening to them are just that, pathetic. Yeah, some of them are good,
but not enough. It’s just that simple.
Take some goddamn responsibility.
Until Americans get
that they are responsible, they will not also get that they can change
things. If Americans are powerless, if it’s “not their fault” that also
means they can’t fix it.
We are in a
slow-motion collapse. While
it is still theoretically possible we can save our society, the odds are low. The
fight is not yet pointless, but it is clear that since 1980, the center has
collapsed. It is difficult to organize dissent, it is difficult to fund a
campaign that will succeed against the big interests that dominate our culture
and economy. If this doesn’t change, soon, everyone will be on their own, doing
what they can for themselves. Who wins if that happens? Corporations, the 1% and the political entrepreneurs.
And our
political entrepreneurs continue to apologize for the American public, making the
case that that Americans both individually and as a group are not complicit in
America’s decline. “It’s not your responsibility” really means “don’t pay
attention, don’t try and change it, get whatever you can.”
Instead, blame
the immigrants, the liberals, the poor, and the undereducated. They are the
reason America is failing, not you. Well, that’s simply Bullshit.
Those
people standing behind the cash registers, just trying to get by are as much to
blame for the state of our country as those of us who think we know better.
The
Economist had an article
in 2011 about Earnest Dichter, the Austrian immigrant who revolutionized marketing
in the US:
week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making
decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational.
We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons
Most
of the theory behind this practice of helping Americans work against our
interests comes from Dichter. Dichter observed in 1960, in his book “The Strategy of Desire”:
would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart
we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do
Welcome
to the wild west of capitalism.
From
Ronald Reagan to Karl Rove to Corker in Chattanooga, we have been encouraged to mislead
ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are.
