Tag: UAW

The Losers Striking at General Motors: It’s time to replace the ungrateful workers with a robot

Here’s the grim reality, and I say this as a person who has three General Motors cars in my garage, the losers striking against the company are out of their minds socialists and it’s a real shame. There is no place in America for a labor union especially in a car manufacturer. The workers are not management, as unions like to believe. A worker is just a worker, they don’t get to share in the risk and reward as some natural right. If you are a pot smoking union worker who calls themselves “middle class” you are not equal to the management mechanisms. What the UAW is doing to General Motors going after the company after a year of decent profits is robbery and every striking employee should be fired and replaced with a worker who wants to work for the good pay and benefits that do come from General Motors. I know most of the workers on that picket line don’t read very much, and they’d be ashamed if they did to read Karl Marx, but what they are doing is straight out of that book on communism and they are presenting themselves as an impediment toward a productive marketplace. This whole business of pitting workers against the corporations that employ them is straight out of the pages of socialism and communism making every worker who participates an activist for that vile, anti-capitalist enterprise. It’s just embarrassing to have one of America’s great car companies saddled with such a limitation.

I just bought a General Motors car and believe me, I looked at everything before buying. Out of all the cars on the market it was only the ones from General Motors that even had a little appeal to me. I wanted to find something besides General Motors because of all the union disputes, and the embarrassing bankruptcy that the company went through ten years ago, but honestly out of all the cars on the market in the 50K plus range including BMW and Mercedes, they weren’t good enough for me. So yes, I buy American cars not just for the flag waving aspect of it, but because I think they are the best cars on the market. However, I felt less good about it because of these strikes that seem to always be in the news, whether last year we were talking about the Lordstown Plant in Ohio or this latest disaster that even involves the Bowling Green plant in Kentucky. Workers in the striking GM plants average roughly $1200 per week in wages so it’s not like they are starving for doing jobs that most anybody could do. Yet they don’t think that’s fair enough because their perspective is so skewed that reality is lost to them. For anybody else in the world, that would be a great wage, but not for the socialist union worker that can never get enough. For all those reasons I almost didn’t buy a new GM car. The reason my wife and I finally did was purely because of the design. General Motors put the best design on the road and the technology that went with it, and that was not a union effort, it was just good market strategy and engineering. Anybody can mechanize an assembly line to put together a car. But to design the car and compete in the marketplace takes a lot more than just showing up for work every day and punching out the time clock at the end. Working and management are not equal parts of the process and the compensation should never reflect such a thought. The GM workers are lucky to have a job that pays so well, I would say it’s too much now, let alone looking for more.

You don’t hear about Honda or Toyota striking like this. The socialist labor unions have tried to penetrate all the car companies to some extent but the foreign competition does not suffer through the same problems as General Motors seems to always have, due to the perception that there is loot for the taking in the American car company due to its rich history. The average worker doesn’t know much about how a company becomes great, or how much government bail out money supports General Motors due to the top-heavy legacy costs that are part of doing business, that are becoming more and more unnecessary. I know a lot of people who work for General Motors and have in the past, I know well the type of people who are walking that picket line. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. They know their jobs. They know their neighborhoods and they know when bread is on sale at the grocer and where they can buy beer. Outside of those parameters you won’t find the next great philosopher working on the line in the Bowling Green plant. I’ve been to that facility, its mostly asleep. My take on the place is that robots should be running everything, and at a typical Toyota plant, it probably would be. In the competitive market of automotive building, every hour of productivity lost can cost up to $1.3 million per hour, and if General Motors isn’t building cars for the marketplace, well then, Toyota and Honda will build them instead. Someone will take those jobs while those idiots are out there chanting on behalf of Karl Marx.

And if I were General Motors management, I’d rather automate then pay those workers to always be a volatile part of the supply chain. There are few things worse than a striking employee, whether it’s a teacher’s union or an automotive manufacturer. When you are at a stop light and most of the cars around you are foreign, and you have to compete directly with them for cost and profitability, you have to mitigate as much unreliability out of your process and in regard to the typical General Motors employee, most of those jobs could be eliminated and replaced with a robot. And given the amount of money that they are demanding, they should be. So what if it costs General Motors $1.3 million an hour? The looters in the union see that number and they rationalize that its cheaper for General Motors to cave into their demands. But these things are not just measured in money. The opportunity cost of having such unreliable workers is far greater and General Motors to be competitive in the future is going to have to eliminate that variability. Its not the job of General Motors to give these people a job. It’s the job of a car company to make a car that someone like me will buy. How it gets put together is a variable that is up to the manufacturer. It doesn’t require some lazy line worker with the IQ of a jellyfish. The union has greatly overstated their value in the matter.

I would be prouder of General Motors if they busted their union. I would still buy their cars. I don’t want to look at my cars and think of a bunch of Karl Marx slugs that aren’t happy with $62K per year just for using a power drill to apply a few screws per car that comes before them on the assembly line. I want to see a company that outmaneuvered the competition and engineered a superior product into the marketplace. In a world where everyone else is working, the GM workers are smoking crack if they think they are going to bring the whole thing to a stop with their stupid picket line. Rather the world will move on as it should. I don’t care how General Motors builds their cars. I just want them to keep doing it, preferably without the labor union losers who think they are the critical process in the construction of an automobile. Management is not owned by the people, it’s a task for people who think, and is not something that can be shared as Karl Marx uttered. And every striking employee should be ashamed of themselves and have their jobs eliminated as a result of this strike.

Rich Hoffman
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The International Union Conspiracy at Lordstown

There has been a lot of talk about President Trump’s relationship to business and his comments made about them when they fail, such as the Lordstown GM plant in Ohio recently which has closed. Of course the cause of the closing has been the subject of much debate, as socialist minded people think that jobs just arise out of thin air and just always exist without much effort from them. General Motors in general is a company that displays the result of what happens when management of an industry falls to the “workers.” It’s like wondering why putting a wolf in the hen-house results into all the chickens being eaten. Workers are not inclined to the management of their own efforts, in fact the word management isn’t something they are interested in at all. Most people simply want a pay check from week to week and they don’t care about the details of managing millions of dollars in assets. So when they run something like a General Motors organization through their labor unions with straight up and down votes that do not occur at the speed of business, nobody should be surprised when everything falls apart. A wonderful exhibition of this mystifying sentiment can be seen below from an article contemplating the universe and how the latest General Motors plant in the automotive industry has ended up going out of business.

On Sunday, Trump also criticized David Green, the local UAW president at GM’s Lordstown plant, labeling him a Democrat.
Green didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill said he disagreed with Trump’s criticism of the local union leader.
Green “is in the same boat as me,” Hill said. “We have no local control, as it is between GM and UAW International. They both have a stake in this now. We will still push for a new product and remain optimistic. I am not going to beat up GM because they’ve been here for 53 years, they’ve been good neighbors.”

Brian Rothenberg, a spokesman for UAW International, said that the union’s focus is on its members and that it “will leave no stone unturned in working to keep the plants open.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/gm-to-trump-to-be-clear-the-company-and-uaw-will-decide-fate-of-lordstown-plant/ar-BBUTLZT?ocid=spartanntp

So the union is at a loss of words to understand why they are now out of a job, which I have covered extensively in other articles. Essentially, you can’t remove a brain from a human body and expect the hands and fingers to move. There is no collective force in the universe that can transplant good leadership, and the basic socialist elements of all union membership eliminates the nurturing of good leadership in any business culture. Leaders so inclined toward thoughtful transactions of strategy to tactical implementation go other places to express themselves leaving companies like General Motors to die in the business world like some poor soul in a guillotine from some Dark Ages Biblical conspiracy getting their head chopped off for not agreeing that a goat is their new god of worship.

However, the operative word in that little MSN article was “international.” How can a labor union with international membership and a value system incorporated outside of the United States function properly to represent the needs of a country and their business environment? This has been an issue for me with every trade union especially the government ones such as the International Firefigher’s Union. What does an international union with members in Europe or elsewhere know or care about fighting fires in a local community, yet the charters and values of the union members aren’t to the United States but to the values of global socialism. Sure they typically hang American flags in the firehouse and the local firefighters are paraded around as patriots, even the members themselves think they are the very sentiment of patriotism and danger, because society tells them that to inflate their egos, but their value systems and overall management come from international concerns. Specifically in the case of the Lordstown plant, the UAW had to defer his responsibility for his members to the “international” union values which are far away from any local control in Ohio, as to why the situation in the General Motors plant couldn’t be rectified.

All these labor unions, especially the government ones for which teachers are admitted to are international socialist organizations that have nothing to do with American patriotism or local management of resources. They are chaos bound monstrosities that simply throw money where managers should be and circumstances derive out of the mess until a consumer decides to stop buying the product of the company sieged by such nonsense. Only in the government unions tax payers have no other choice but to support the international trade unions of their local firefighters, police, and teachers, so the costs just go up forever until the society of their origin collapses eventually. That is why everything that has the word “international” associated with it is too expensive and inefficient, because it essentially states that nobody is in charge and chaos is driving the endeavor. To hide that chaos huge amounts of money are spent because the concept of such an approach to anything is rooted in socialism. There are no capitalist labor unions. They were all formed straight from the pages of Karl Marx, not Adam Smith.

Yet we never address the issue as to why all labor unions are failures because we have been trained by them from our inception never to ask the question. We certainly don’t get such training in our public educations, which is completely controlled by international labor union sentiment. Which is the same as saying, nobody. Labor unions are controlled by blobs of socialist hopefuls who have no idea how to manage anything, yet they are in control of the means of production. That is after all the dream of all socialists, to control the means of production. Well, what happened at the Lordstown General Motors plant is that the international UAW union had control of the means of production and the result was a product that was too expensive and couldn’t compete on the open market when buyers had a choice between the piece of crap GM was making and all the other automobiles that were on the market.

What does the Lordstown mayor know about production, as a politician they are typically of the same mind as the union laborer, a hack of bad management hiding their incompetence’s behind vast sums of wasted money. We elect politicians to provide leadership, but very few people really understand what makes leadership possible so we always end up settling for some process driven geek that learned how things should be done by some organizational sentiment. The United States military is a fine example of this, they use mass to crush a fly because that is the nature of their organization, and they often have no competition, so they can function with tremendous inefficiencies and still be considered good. But rarely do they ever nurture along leadership, they produce bosses, but not cutting edge thinkers. There are millions and millions of people who learn to boss people around based on some system derived from tradition, but there are very few leaders who can think on their feet and guide people to greatness for everyone’s benefit. International trade unions simply don’t understand the difference between a boss and a leader. So they drive away the incentives that make great leaders in favor of process driven bosses who enforce compliance to rules established by inefficient people from a far away point of reference who don’t have a clue as to what’s going on. Then when everything fails, they stand around pointing their fingers like idiots looking to blame some invisible force. But the real villains, especially when it comes to international trade unions are the collective approach to problems and the remote elusiveness of the systems that evoked the failure to begin with. And the Lordstown GM plant in Ohio is a perfect example of just such a failure. They did let down America by allowing international influences to control the means of production, and the result was a product that people didn’t want at a price they found laughable.

Rich Hoffman

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Lost Chicken Nuggets and Killing Ants: How the UAW are parasitic attackers of Tesla Motors Inc.

I’m usually pretty considerate about all life, even little insects. If I see a little spider in the corner of my house or a little beetle caught in my swimming pool I fetch them up and take them outside someplace safe so they can live for about five more minutes, because I consider all life precious. But I had a situation today, I was working at my computer area and it looks like one of my grandkids had dropped a chicken nugget under a table where it was hard to see and ants were crawling all around the area I work. If it were just one ant or two, I would have taken them outside, but when it became hundreds, I had no choice but to kill them and smash them into oblivion so that their little friends got the message, they didn’t want to set up shop in that location because that would end their lives. I found the old nugget and threw it out, but it would take a while for the ants to get the message, and I didn’t have a while to let them crawl all over my stuff. So I killed them all. And as I was doing it I thought of the story where Elon Musk was being attacked in a similar way by the United Auto Workers at his Tesla plants.

One thing I don’t agree with Donald Trump on his was love of union workers. As a New York business guy, he has learned to deal with them—and as a good negotiator he knows how to talk their language. Trump is willing to work with them, I’m not. I think labor unions should be illegal because of their roots into socialism. They have no place in an American economy. They are the idiots who have dramatically limited the amount of productive work each American now thinks they must commit to in order to make a living and those ideas have made the value of American workers to not be competitive in a world that is more than willing to work more than forty hours a week and into the weekends The opportunity cost of the American labor unions has been enormous, and now they are doing to Elon Musk what they have done to so many American companies, they are trying to move in and take over the management of his company, and he’s not happy about it.

Because Musk didn’t just lay down and let the UAW attack his company like all those vile ants I was talking about attacking that chicken nugget, UAW president Dennis Williams led his organization to do what all progressive Democrats do, they used thuggish tactics to attempt to change the behavior of the company. In the case of Tesla the company provides their employees stock options which have the potential of being a lot more valuable than just cash on a weekly pay check. It’s a chance for those workers to become truly wealthy. But that’s not what the union wants, they want membership dues so they can convert that cash to political activism—and when Musk pushed back on their premise, the UAW filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. That is like those ants filing a complaint that they had a right to occupy my work space and that I couldn’t just wipe them out so I could get back to work—because they wanted that stupid chicken nugget that had fallen on the ground by my grandchildren. The thing wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place.

The assumption was that collective masses of people in a labor union are valuable just because they exist, but to a business owner, they aren’t. Once a business owner loses management of their company to a bunch of loser labor union members who try to run everything on a vote, companies quickly have two things happen to them, they must raise their prices to pay for the collective bargaining of those employees, or they go out of business to companies who don’t have to deal with those restrictions. Musk said as much in a Tweet recently where he warned workers that it was the UAW that destroyed over 200,000 jobs at General Motors and Chrysler. The government had to sweep in and bail out the automakers because they were too big to fail. The mentality of the labor unions is to latch themselves to industry and milk everything dry until there isn’t anything left causing any company that didn’t want to go out of business to pick up their enterprise and move it to some other country with less labor union influence.

Labor unions are a creation of the Karl Marx philosophy of public ownership of everything, which was outlined clearly in the pathetic book The Communist Manifesto. Such people do not take into account the value of what management does for a company, in the risks that are taken that justify larger pay checks for the front of the house. Everyone is not equal in such an arrangement, once a labor union takes over a company like Tesla, then its all over for the innovation such companies provide. Once everything takes a vote from the same people who would rather spend their time smoking joints at lunch and looking at pornography on their phones, nothing good happens again, so Musk is smart to fight back against the UAW.

Not everyone is cut out for management, believe it or not, the ambitious people who typically run companies think about other things than the usual needs of biological flesh pleasures and filling their fat stomachs with food—and that makes them better positioned to decide what work hours will be, who the company does business with, and what the value of pay for employees will be based on market conditions. The UAW destroys the companies they move into—just like the ants wanting to eat that left-over chicken nugget that my grandkids dropped, the UAW sees a new company that is making new things and they want to suck off it until everything is gone. Of course, they think things will go on forever, because they don’t understand market conditions, they don’t read about the industry they are in and are constantly making decisions as the captain of the ship to keep everything pointed in the right direction, workers just want to know when they get paid and to make sure that everything is fair. Lazy workers get paid the same as productive workers, smart people get paid the same as dumb people—dumb being defined by people addicted to substances—food, alcohol, cigarettes, or even drugs who don’t take the time to develop their minds toward the needs of strategy and imaginative growth potential.

Unionized workers don’t make America great, they are parasites looking for opportunity off the backs of those who take chances and start businesses and do all the really hard work of making something from nothing. If Musk hadn’t created the Tesla car company to begin with the UAW workers would have nothing to try to loot from, there would be no chicken nugget to consume as the parasites I described in the ants flooding my computer desk. They only care about money when there isn’t any to loot off any more unlike the entrepreneur who has to go to the bank and put their life on the line to get the startup capital to put the whole show on. But they look at Elon Musk and figure that he’s a rich billionaire and that they are entitled to some of his money just because they exist, and that is the real danger.

Elon Musk has been able to do neat things with the money he has made relatively free of labor union disputes, because much of what he has built arrived faster than the normal business cycles. It takes labor unions a while to realize when a chicken nugget has fallen on the ground because they are busy thinking about everything else in life but work. But once they do hear that someone like Tesla is doing something they might be able to latch on to then they arrive like insects to take everything over and destroy the vision that came from the risk takers—people like Elon Musk. The real damage comes when legal fights start consuming the life of Musk from parasites like the UAW instead of him trying to figure out how to colonize Mars, or how to build Hyperloops under major American cities to alleviate ground traffic—the opportunity cost to our nation is enormous.

The average labor union employee just wants to get paid each week so they can purchase their vanities, deposit their sexual needs into some other person, and buy clothes off the bargain rack at Wal-Mart and that’s fine if that’s all they want out of life. But when they start seeking to have an impact on the opportunity cost of new American businesses, like Tesla, that is already propped up by the government for its seed money, the UAW is taking a shot at all of us, not just Elon Musk. And I personally find each and every one of them offensive, parasitic, and destructive to the American economy. They sure aren’t patriots—just bottom feeders.

Maybe I’ll buy a Tesla today.  I love that they are a non-union plant in California!!!!  That status should be rewarded by the marketplace.

Rich Hoffman

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