Alternate Route

Nov 5, 2009 - That's MY Job

The image is from the Charlie Chaplin classic, "Modern Times", which follows the Little Tramp through his trials and tribulations at a factory.

I was reminded of the film while reading an interesting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about how Ford is making it comeback, and how the UAW is throwing a real monkey wrench into the works.

The real issue is the job classifications.

Ford's UAW contract has lots of them, governing who can and who can't perform specified tasks on the factory floor. So if a machine breaks down, an assembly line can come to a halt while everyone waits for the worker with the proper classification to arrive at the scene. If other workers nearby are perfectly capable of fixing the machine, well, that doesn't matter. The number of job classifications is less than it was a decade ago, but it's still far too many to maximize a factory's efficiency.

The classifications and attendant work rules are enforced by union bureaucracies—members of each plant's shop committee, grievance committee, health and safety committee, etc. They're all paid by the companies, as are their legions of corporate counterparts. One man's feather-bedding is another man's job.

All this begs a fundamental, and uncomfortable, question. Can a UAW-represented car company compete effectively, long term, with its nonunion competitors? At the very least, companies organized by the UAW have lots of extra costs to bear at their factories located in the U.S.

The UAW members at Ford may want it to still be the heydey of their power and influence, but they really need to catch up with modern times before they're left behind wondering what happened to their jobs.

Read the entire article at wsj.com

4:08 am | Categories: automotive news, ford, uaw Permalink | Alert Administrator

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