you can thank your “Free Trade” right here – where once these jobs represented stability and middle class livelihoods for working-class people, now the work will move to china and what will these people do?

you can say you don’t care, but you’d better – if our country doesn’t manufacture anything, and we allow the free import without tariffs of items made by virtual slave-labor wage structures (under oppressive regimes – again, i know you probably don’t care, but…) – what does that hold for our overall economy?

exactly. we’re becoming china.

lovely.

i’m not fan of AC/Delco / Delphi, but the bigger picture is the issue here. do you want the government’s computers built by Communist China? I sure as hell don’t. and vehicle components aren’t so far off from Intel Pentiums.

But the government’s computers are already built by China. I challenge you to try to build a computer without using ANY components made in China.
In any case, Germany and Japan have high labor costs, too. Why can the Germans and the Japanese compete? They have competitive, compelling products, as far as we can tell. I suppose their having single-payer health care and no military expenditure also helps.
Why hasn’t the UAW tried to unionize the foreign-owned plants in the US? That would level the playing field substantially.

I agree with # 2 but the union is practically an organized mafia mob here in the country I live in. Being a business owner that has been terrorized and threatened by the union heads, I see things in a different way. The problem in US is at a lesser degree but no different. Demands and more demands but they perform horribly compared to hardworking happily paid (not underpaid) workers in other countries. If you have worked in at least 3 other countries outside US, you would know the conditions. The only way for these spoiled underperforming guys to survive is to get together and ask for more $, get their competitors overseas to get the same mob mentality, or realize reality and start working like those foreign slaves they got in US companies.

So #1, there’s no point in caring if the union workers themselves don’t care if they’re killing their employers which may have a huge impact on the overall economy.

Jim, I will do just as you suggest. Thank you Free Trade!

What the UAW proivides its members is an atifical “middle class”. I’m not going to sit here and say that the UAW members don’t work hard, but I will say they are rediculously overpaid. The UAWs labor is not worth what they are being paid right here in America, forget China. The reailty of the situation is that most of them are working $12 an hour jobs that any high school drop out or immigrant could take over at a moments notice, but are making 3 times that. I don’t blame them for that, atleast not alone, the manufactueres signed the contracts just as the UAW did.

The UAW and other unions were generally good things when they came about, but now must of the protections they fought so hard for so long ago are guaranteed by the Federal Goverment, for all of us. We should all be grateful to the unions for that. However things changed over time and the unions have been distorted into what they are now, a group of people who some how think they deserve 3 times the going rate for their labor AND great benefits all at the same time as they watch their employers crumble around them. They are practically cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Be clear, I don’t blame the unions for the domestic slump alone, I assign them equal blame right along side the manufactueres. It’s both parties faults that they couldn’t work out agreements that cope with the realities of the gobal economy.