Friday, July 31, 1998

A pointless strike ends after too long

The 54-day strike against General Motors is over now, and there's blood all over the floor.

Even after taxes, the company's profit losses are about $3 billion and, even after unemployment and other benefits have kicked in, the wage losses of the 200,000 affected workers are about $400 million.

The American economy has taken a hit, too. Partly because of the strike, a healthy growth rate may have been reduced to something anemic.

So, what's the gain from all the pain? So far as the human eye can discern, it's nothing.

GM has pledged to keep a couple of factories open a couple of years longer, but that's hardly a long-term solution to worker insecurity. And the United Auto Workers agreed to let welders weld more parts before calling it a day, but that's a laughable answer to the company's crying need to increase efficiency.

If GM was going to suffer this strike, it needed to come out with something better, it has been pointed out. This is the nation's largest corporation, but observers note that it is also the least productive of the nation's Big Three auto manufacturers. It takes the company longer to make a car than its top competitors, and it sell cars at less profit than its top competitors.

Its share of market has been shrinking and it has failed to get along with its employees. If any of its prospects have now improved, it's hard to spot how.

As for the UAW, it is a good example of why no more than 14 percent of the workforce bothers to join a union today. It apparently violated a contract with GM in carrying out this strike, and, several accounts make clear, seemed to have no clear idea of what it wanted to accomplish.

Its chief concern is job security at a time when factories are moving abroad, but some of the work rules the union clings to only serve to weaken the competitiveness of home production.

The UAW, it has been noted, is itself a clumsy bureaucracy with no obvious notion of how it best might serve the cause of its members in an era of radical economic change.

The shame of it is that the UAW resorted to a destructive, childish, pointless tactic to vent member frustrations, that GM lacked a creative response and that the United States as a whole will suffer economically.