UAW - United Against Wisdom

I can't believe that I, as a normal taxpayer, am being loaded up with even more debt thanks to the UAW.

I'll give it to their negotiators, who have been successful time and again, at winning deals that are financially unsustainable for the auto companies. The UAW has exercised it's might, right to the point of breaking the companies they work for! Great job, guys!

This is nothing new. All you have to do is look at the Quad Cities, a set of four towns on the Mississippi river between Iowa and Illinois, to see that the exact same thing happened in the mid-eighties. The big difference is that there were no government bail-outs back then, so factories were shut down and moved to other areas. The UAW tactics worked for years in the Quad Cities, winning labor deals that made many workers much more money than they could explain. But when it got too carried away, the companies simply left town, unable to meet union demands after many months of strikes and negotiations. It broke the town, for years. Sound familiar Detroit?

So now here we stand, being asked as a country to honor the deals that auto executives signed for retired employees, because it would be sad not to. These workers count on this deal! These workers worked for years to earn it! These workers deserve my tax money! OK, maybe not that last one. Since when is it my responsibility to make good on union deals? I don't want that burden, no matter how sad the retired workers look.

All of this comes down to entitlement. There seems to be a growing call for the government to make everything OK, even if that costs our children their future. This is not a train I want to be on. But what are my options? The UAW isn't about to grow up and make hard decisions in Detroit. The Obama campaign doesn't seem ready to tell this large group of political supporters that they can't help them. And I really don't want to move to Canada.

I grew up in The Quad Cities. And to me this feels like a bad flashback. The UAW is breaking things again.