The End of the UAW and GM as We Now Know Them

The two underlying problems of the American auto industry are manufactures are not building cars that enough people are willing to pay for, and the unions are just an other thick, unproductive layer of management.

GM has over a million cars and trucks in inventory and Delphi plants are cranking out parts as fast as ever. This leads me to believe that come the end of January, Delphi will lock out the UAW, hire replacement workers and make management work production. The plants that can be moved will be loaded on trucks and quickly moved down South to waiting factories where production will resume.

This is how automation has changed the work place: it takes very few production workers to make parts and cars now. It is now done more on tradition,inertia and laziness. The plants of today are full of automated machines that can be re-tooled in minutes and hours compared to the old plants with one of-a-kind machinery that relied on human labor to produce just one type of part.

After this re-configuration these plants will be broken up, then bundled into units and sold with long term contracts with GM and other auto makers. The industry will have come full circle to what it was through the 20's to 60s: truly independent vendors supplying more and smaller final assemblers that market vehicles through a dealer network.

The Unions will need to be something much different than what they are today...