Not News: UAW Considering Plan to Milk the Unemployment System If It Calls a GM Strike
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 10:30 PM EDT
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The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM’s cost structure still being higher than that seen at Toyota’s and Nissan’s U.S. plants by about 15 percent and 31 percent, respectively. The New York Times is only carrying reports from the wires.
One note of substance about the UAW’s strategy covered at Bloomberg News — surely known to others following the industry who are filing bland reports — is that it plans to milk the unemployment insurance system in the event of a protracted strike.
To be clear, such a strike would appear to be very unlikely, if for no other reason than the fact that Americans remember that the Obama administration bailed out GM at a considerable cost several years ago. The final fully-loaded cost involved was $26.5 billion — not the $11.2 billion touted by the press last year. It’s safe to say that quite a few people would not take kindly to the idea of the primary beneficiaries of that unprecedented largesse walking out on their jobs when so many others are still unemployed and under-employed over six years after the most recent recession’s official end.
(Additionally, the linked $26.5 billion analysis appears not to have picked up the effect of the government permitting GM to carry forward $16 billion in tax losses incurred by the “old GM” into the “new GM” — even though “a business that undergoes a change in ownership usually has to forfeit the old company’s net operating losses,” which certainly happened during the bailout. At the statutory federal income tax rate of 35 percent, that decision alone cost the U.S. treasury $5.6 billion.)
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Argh!
And the UAW isn’t happy?
Talk about Crony Capitalism.
Now they want to stick the taxpayer — via unemployment insurance — with the cost of their “strike”.
Guess no one remembers the current 18T+ national debt and the guesstimated 200T+ in unfunded liabilities that our posterity will have to deal with!
Argh!
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