WSJ and the UAW....Same old, Same old

I just finished reading Holman W. Jenkins column in the April 1, 2009 Wall Street Journal entitled "GM Bankruptcy? Tell Me Another" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123853988781575499.html.

I thought I would find something new and interesting but it's just the same page from the playbook of Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Jenkins makes the same arguments that Rush has in that the problems of the Detroit automakers can be laid at the door of the UAW and the United States Congress in their push for better fuel economy in passenger vehicles. They all want to make the car companies and by extension, their management the victims of the UAW and the congress.

What a load of baloney!!! The car companies keep harping on the fact that "we only sell cars that people want to buy, and the wanted to buy big honking SUV's and now that people don't like to pay for higher gas, that's not our fault".

Let's face realities..people buy cars for the same reason that they buy everything else and that is because of the influence of marketing. It was the skillful marketing of the big three that made the SUV so popular (and by the way enable the big three to make big profits on them). Car companies don't follow demand, they lead it. Otherwise, why would they have marketing and advertising departments for which the spend millions on, not to mention all the TV ad time they take up during prime events like the Superbowl. If the car companies had any vision, they would have been crafting marketing messages that would have alerted people to the danger of foreign oil and that a car that gets good gas mileage can be "cool" to drive and could have made a nice profit on cars like that but Detroit decided to take the easy way out.

With regard to the UAW, I never saw a big three executive with a gun at his head and forced to sign a contract. Those contracts were entered into by both parties...nobody "imposed" terms on the other. If the big three did not like the UAW terms, then they should have ramped up and gotten ready for a fight each time the union contracts came up. The union cannot be blamed for a contract that both parties negotiated and agreed to. If the big three did not like the terms, they should have let a strike happen and starve the UAW out. I'm quite certain that in the long run, the big three would have had the resources to do that.

Auto executives and their proxies should stop pointing fingers and acting like the innocent victims in this tragedy.

The Decline of Detroit - Maybe

Here is the text of a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the Wall Street Journal.

I wish to respectfully associate myself with the comments made by Mr. John Schnapp in his article entitled The Decline of Detroit and was published in the July 14-16 2007 Wall Street Journal and can be found at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118437946701766538-search.html?KEYWORDS=schnapp&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month.

Mr. Schnapp correctly points out a number of things that people who wish to continually bash the UAW seem to miss, namely that Detroit makes cars that many people do not want for various reasons.

I get so tired of hearing the over used statistic about $1500 per car goes to pay for retirees health costs. If Detroit made cars that people truly wanted, the $1500 would decrease or be eliminated due to volume.

I am also so tired of hearing the big three state that they produce cars that the market demand. Taking a "let's see what they want and we'll give it to them" approach versus being world class and designing and building cars and marketing cars that are innovative has made the Big Three move into second rate status as an industry.

We need leadership in Detroit that will not simply bend to whatever is popular. They need to innovate to create the next generation of cars that will create the demand that they so desperately need. They did it before with the SUV and the minivan, and they now need to do it again.