I think it’s a bit of a red herring to say “hey, they got a bailout too!” as a justification for more bailouts. See the latest post on this blog about pigs at the government trough. Once you open the floodgates, you create the moral hazard of dropping money out of a helicopter, as our Federal Reserve chairman so famously advocated. This just leads to a bigger future mess.

The “bailouts” have already reached over $8 trillion. This simply cannot be sustained.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/21/AR2008112101348.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/12/01/financial/f151504S89.DTL

It’s further undone by the fact that non-union auto plants will likely soon be affected by their labor costs:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081038999094.htm?chan=magazine+channel_news

What it seems to come down to is that corporations don’t want to pay a living wage; they want the quality of life in the US to sink to the level of that in the developing nations whose wages they’re pitting the wages of US citizens against.

Assuming the anecdote is entirely accurate, my understanding is that work rules are negotiated on a local basis – so those may not be the same across the board at every “DA” location.

Though the process seems overly-complicated, I can imagine how it would be important to do a good job to track the delivery and disbursement of expensive resources like PCs throughout a large organization like an auto manufacturer.

Flipping things around, by that same standard FedEx has some pretty cumbersome rules it imposes on its contractors (with respect to reimbursement for all of the costs associated with working for FedEx and practices its workers must observe). There are a whole lot of allegation and lawsuits following FedEx around (for violating labor and transportation laws).

The way I see it, the money for Detroit is peanuts compared to what is being allocated for Wall Street in addition to the $700 billion bailout (which is receiving far less oversight):

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081125/BIZ/811250414

Roughly the same percentage of the population opposed the Wall Street Bailout too:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/106114/Six-Oppose-Wall-Street-Bailouts.aspx

I find it hypocritical that we let nearly a trillion dollars fly out the door to Wall Street but we give the third degree to the domestic auto industry.

Actually MORE fiscally responsible that way, and eases onerous federal regs.

Alas, Congressional Democrats won’t even bring it up for a vote.

–Nick
http://www.RightMichigan.com