The most recent post here at LITD dove into the irony of a countercultural icon, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, who checks off the proper boxes right down to coming out as gay after a marriage that produced a son, getting ousted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he also co-founded) for telling a New York Times interviewer that he finds white male rock titans more substantive interviews than female or black ones.
Today we look at another deliciously ironic loggerheads: organized labor versus the climate alarmists:
If you want to understand why the United Auto Workers union is striking now, look at the three factories it chose to target for its first wave shutdowns.
The General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, makes the Chevy Colorado and the GMC Savana. The Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, makes Ford Rangers and Ford Broncos. And the Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators.
What do all these vehicles have in common? Unlike electric vehicles that lose money, these vehicles are among the Big Three’s most profitable products. They are also exactly the type of vehicle President Joe Biden wants to eliminate by 2032, when his new regulations mandate that two-thirds of all cars sold in the United States must be EVs.
Not only do EVs have fewer parts than gasoline models, which means fewer jobs for auto workers, but every plant that produces mufflers, catalytic converters, and fuel injectors will have to shutter, either permanently or long enough for a complete overhaul to make EV parts.
Biden’s obsession with EVs has essentially made all UAW-organized factories in the Midwest obsolete. Why would a car company invest there when they could build a new factory in a state where workers aren’t forced to join unions?
It's all I can do not to digress here and go on a diatribe about Biden's presumption that he can insert himself into the workings of the free market - which, to reiterate the basics, boys and girls, is merely the sum total of the millions of agreements to which buyers and sellers arrive daily, ideally without government interference - by executive diktat, no less. But let's stay focused.
Current UAW president Shawn Fain may not be collectivist enough for the Trotskyists, but he's a pretty classic figure for a labor activist. He comes from the heart of flyover country - Kokomo, Indiana - where his dad was police chief and two of his grandparents were UAW members who worked at a Chrysler facility there. Fain himself went to work at the Chrysler castings plant as an electrician in 1994 and pretty much immediately started climbing the union ranks.
In the current situation, he champions the position that union members ought to continue to get paid even if an automaker shutters a plant.
I do need to digress a bit here and get into the question of what is and isn't a right.
Fain and his ilk take it as a given that there is some kind of right to a livelihood. Making things that are desirable into "rights" is how we got government involvement in health care - an aspect of life that figures into the current auto industry strike situation.
It's actually understandable that he would conclude thusly. Cars, as well as self-propelling transportation generally, and communications technology, too, came on the scene at the outset of the twentieth century with such impact that by the 1920s, they were a given. And they were made in factories by people earning hourly wages.
But just as their arrival on the cultural landscape was a manifestation of how unbridled human inventiveness could introduce drastic changes, innovation continued apace and wrought further changes. The 1980s forced the Big Three to move over to make way for foreign car makers to erect US plants. And many of those have stayed non-unionized, which should have been a sign to the UAW that its ability to make demands had limits.
And now comes another wave of change, albeit not born of human inventiveness but the heavy hand of the state.
So who's going to blink first as the climate alarmists, backed by the coercive power of government, go toe to toe with the UAW, which is still locked in a mindset that sees the mid-twentieth-century model of the town factory guaranteeing generation after generation a secure lifestyle?
There's a way to avoid this scenario of bad alternatives, if anyone is interested.
Let people buy the kinds of cars they want to buy, and remove all government - and union - interference in how they're priced - which, to a considerable degree, is still based on the carmakers' costs. Then we can see what the market says about what the cars are worth.
ADDENDUM: I don't know if this qualifies as a digression or not, but the Very Stable Genius is going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates' debate in order to address the UAW. It's pretty obvious what he's doing: striving to take some of the wind out of the sails of Biden's expression of support for the union. It's of a piece with what he recently said about Florida's six-week abortion ban. When the VSG hedges his political bets, he's not particularly sly about it.
Trump has no principles. He does anything he does in order to see if it will bring him glorification.
Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a digression. But it's good to know where the charlatan of Mar-a-Lago fits into the current situation.
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