Let's say you're a business owner, and for decades, you made several mistakes that caused you to fall from your vaunted position atop your industry and plummet into bankruptcy. But you have turned things around and your company is once again profitable and things are starting to look rosy again. Now that your out of the red, would you start to make the same mistakes you did earlier? The AFL-CIO thinks this is a swell idea:
The powerful head of the AFL-CIO called on Detroit's recovering automakers Monday to give back concessions made by union workers to preserve the industry.
"The three major U.S. companies are making profits again," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a speech on the opening day of the United Auto Workers' constitutional convention. "We salute their success, and we demand that they do right by the workers who have done right by them.
Departing UAW President Ron Gettelfinger urged members, meanwhile, to keep the faith. "Today, more than ever, we need to feel the passion of the labor movement," he told hundreds of delegates representing autoworkers across the country and, increasingly, employees in other industries.
It's like a milquetoast version of Karl Marx's "workers of the world unit" battle cry. "Feel the passion" sounds more like a Sprite commercial than an urging for his lackeys to surge forward and demand concessions from the auto industry to once again plunge the U.S. auto industry into financial insolvency.
But Ron wasn't done:
"The contempt for the UAW was so deep that some of them were willing to let the industry collapse in the hopes they could destroy us," he said.
No one wanted the auto industry to die, least of all Michiganders, except perhaps the extremist environmentalists, and they are all Democrats. But many right-thinking people do have contempt for the UAW. Not the workers, the union leadership that drove up prices on our cars and pressured non-union auto companies from setting up camp here and bringing more jobs to our state.