The Great UAW Strike of 2023 is On!

Auto Worker's Plan Is New Strikes At Any Moment

https://x.com/glclcky/status/1713516600626741464?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Like always @Steal Your Face is a liar. You can build your own PC just as easy as ever. No one can make their own processor, but you can purchase the components and the OS the way you always were able to. The only difference is you do not have computer shows in the US and have to buy parts online. Our resident sammich maker never built his own PC anyway.

To tell the truth it is a lot easier to build a system today than it was back when I built my first one. OMG do you know what it was like building a 486 system with a dial up connection?

As for cars it is a bit more complicated and you do need more tools and experience, but you are also getting more performance from your car based on the new tech. I could not imagine a 90's starter being able to turn a car engine on and off at stoplights to save gas. I spent a lot more time fucking with drum breaks, distributor caps, and carburetors than I do with new fuel injection systems. Of course, get some electrical voltage problems with your body unit and then evejn the dealer is hopeless. You can still repair the things yourself, you just need to know how.

IIRC the problem with repairing things yourself was with farm equipment.

I don't see how this is relevant I answered your question.

So you found one state.

Thousands Of Auto Workers At Ram 1500 Factory Go On Strike

Oh man, who is going to make coal rolling POS pickups for little dick men now? They just can't catch a break. I am sure ford isn't going to pick up the slack with their woke electric F150. The F stands for fairy magic.

No, that’s the national party’s view on state ballot measures.

UAW, Ford announce tentative agreement

You know what this tells me? Ford's finances aren't nearly as strong as GM's or Stellantis'. Ford bet big on their F-150 Lightning electric truck and sales have basically plateaued. Gee, who could have thought that folks who wanted an electric vehicle to save the planet wouldn't be interested in a ginormous fucking truck? Even with Tesla sales tanking in the US, Ford's having trouble finding buyers for the Mach-E and their electric pickup. Imagine that.

You're being awfully generous by assuming conservatives can find the clit.

Counterpoint, there is a reason that Ford didn’t have to take bailout money in the Great Recession.

With the majority of the Class B (voting) shares held by people or foundations and trusts with the word ‘Ford’ in their name it isn’t your typical private American company where all that matters is next quarter’s numbers.

Hell the Chairman of the Board (and former COO and CEO) is named William Clay Ford Jr.

They also have a history of good labor relations and were the first (and only IIRC) of the Big 3 to completely open their books to the UAW.

It could just be that they are looking more long term/strategic than the other two.

Because in the late 90s, they were about to go tits up, and William Clay Ford, Jr. undertook a radical process to save the company. This included mortgaging the River Rouge plant for a considerable chunk of change. When the crash of '08 hit, they promptly sold Jaguar to Tata (an Indian company), as well as off-loaded Mazda. (Volvo got spun off a couple of years later, and I'm not running down the other companies they sold off.) This gave them cash reserves that the other two didn't have because GM has been ran by a bunch of hapless idiots fairly recently (at about the same time Ford was mortgaging the River Rouge plant, GM had a CEO who didn't know what the phrase "car guy" meant) and after being drained of money by Mercedes, Chrysler wound up the hapless puppet of Cerberus Captial (a hedge fund with ties to Mitt Romney, as I recall), then forced to merge with Fiat (now a division of Stellantis) by the Obama administration, probably in no small part to ensure that if they had to be bailed out a third time, the EU would have to shoulder part of the cost. (A really good book on the history of the automotive industry from ~1945 to 1995 is Car Wars by Jonathan Mantle, and there's not really any heroes in the book.)

To an extent.

Yes, great-grandson of Hitler fan Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone (the tire company guy), a grandson of Edsel Ford (us old folks remember Edsel's as the kind of joke that Pintos and Yugos later became). You know how some Japanese and Korean companies are "family-run" and have turned out better results than Western companies that are "family-run"? Turns out that this is a bit of a myth. See, instead of handing over the company to a potential fail-son, what the Japanese and Korean execs do is adopt their successor. At the same time, their versions of Eric and DJT, Jr. are given a cushy stipend and pushed off to do anything but be involved with the serious operations of the company. I'm not saying that Ford would be a better-run company if Henry's descendants weren't involved with the company, I'm just saying that one can't claim that because their name is on the company, the descendants automatically do a better job of things.

Do they? When I was a kid, we were taught that Ford was a genius because his plan to raise his workers' pay to $5/day enabled them to be able to afford a Model T. Turns out that there were a whole lotta caveats to that. You had to let Ford sociologists probe every aspect of your life in order to even have a chance at qualifying for it. (BTW, that article doesn't even go into the half of it.) It also wasn't even an hourly raise, but a profit-sharing program that would be paid out periodically if Ford hit certain profit numbers. I should also add that Ford hated accountants as much as he hated Jews, so the company didn't have very many until he died. I wouldn't be surprised if this led to a lot of people (less than half of Ford employees qualified for that $5/day rate, BTW) getting shafted, and just a few years later, Ford had some of the lowest wages in the industry.

Then there was the Ford Hunger March where goons hired by Ford (including the Dearborn police) opened fire on unemployed auto workers. Not to mention the Battle of the Overpass. Ford was the last of the Big Three to sign a UAW contract, and the only reason it happened was because Henry Ford's wife threatened to divorce him if he didn't. I'm not going to claim that GM and Chrysler (or even some of the independent automakers) were saints, after all, not only did all of the Big Three refuse to agree to raise employee wages after the end of WWII (wages and overtime rates were frozen and/or reduced at the start of the war, as well as the agreement that there'd be no strikes called by the UAW, with the promise that this would be changed once the war was over), but in the final year or so of the war, more Americans were dying in Detroit factories than were on the battlefields in Europe. Think about that, for a minute. Ike let the Soviets take Berlin because he felt that too many Americans would die (while the Soviets were absolutely out for revenge, so they didn't care how many of their soldiers died, so long as they got to massacre a shitload of Nazis), but we were perfectly fine with letting a larger number of people die in a factory on the other side of the planet.

Oh, and I don't know about you, but as a kid in school in the mid-to-late 70s, I had to take square dancing lessons in school. Why? Because Henry Ford told his Foundation to pay for such things to stave off the "horrid" influence of jazz (you know, "darkie music") on white kids. I dunno if they're still paying for that shit, but it's something to think about seeing as how you've got kids.

I should also point out that when I first signed on to the internet in 1996 (I'd been using things like message boards and similar stuff off-and-on since the late 80s but it wasn't until 1996 that I had enough money to be able to afford a decent PC and an AOL account) my primary reason for doing so was to research a guy by the name of Preston Tucker. Tucker was, at times, a business partner with Henry Ford, so I know more about Henry than I do guys like William Durant (founder of GM, BTW, Keith Olbermann's a descendant of the guy who came up with the name "General Motors"), Alfred P. Sloan, Walter P. Chrysler, and the various other auto executives of the era. I'm under no illusions that they might have been better, or that even if Preston Tucker had been able to get his cars into production, he'd have been a better CEO than any of the others (though I can't imagine him hiring a murdering goon like Harry Bennett). Because that's not how American capitalism works.

My recollection is that all of them eventually did.

Or, it could very well be that they have a better marketing department than the other automakers.

Or maybe in this isolated case, Ford managers were the first to realize that in this particular case the joy of fucking over their workers wasn't worth the risk to the company. That wouldn't make them heroes, just in this isolated instance a little smarter than their competitors. This too shall pass...

GM apparently matching.


General Motors latest offer includes 25% compounded wage increase, COLA reinstatement

https://wapo.st/3tT13JR

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/30/gm-uaw-tentative-agreement/

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-o...-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

Yes! A national strike would be excellent news. Hell, we really need a general strike now. Too many corporations bending us over and treating us like shit while claiming they can't do anything about our pay and benefits. I tell people that we, the workers, are what makes their profits, and it's time to change that arrangement, because it is grossly unfair, especially for the people working their lives away and having nothing to show for it except more and more debt.

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/31/toyota-raises-uaw-strike-ford-gm

Thus demonstrating that the existence of strong unions even helps people who aren't part of them.

“Free Riders”

"an injury to one is an injury to all"

Honda Will Give Autoworkers 11% Raise Following UAW’s Big Wins

https://bsky.app/profile/arindube.bsky.social/post/3kdttuw55l225

There must be some kind of ‘generosity fever’ going around the auto industry as Hyundai randomly decided to raise their wages 25% (hmmm… where have I heard that number before?)….

https://www.al.com/business/2023/11...ing-wages-after-union-takes-on-detroit-3.html

Autoworkers Narrowly Approve Contract With General Motors

Ford, Stellantis Workers Join GM in Ratifying New UAW Contract

Consumers Won't Pay More For Cars Because Of Auto Worker Salary Increases

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/29/uaw-united-automobile-workers-organizing-campaign

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...n-fain-battles-elon-musk-over-ev-labor-future

https://x.com/jstein_wapo/status/1754897902944596257?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ