Driving Me Crazy

Times being what they are, when a Teamsters committee came to the plant in early June to open negotiations over a new contract to start Sept. 1, they thought they might be asked to accept minuscule wage increases and maybe some givebacks on health coverage.

They were stunned by what they heard instead: As of Aug. 31, the plant would be outsourced to an unidentified third-party logistics company and all but three of its 71 employees laid off.

Oh, no!  That evil, evil BMW!  But wait, it gets worse!

BMW's defenders will point out that the company has a perfect legal right to outsource any jobs it wishes. Fair enough. Yet by the same token, American taxpayers had a perfect legal right to tell BMW to drop dead when the firm's credit arm asked the Federal Reserve for a low-interest $3.6-billion loan during the 2008 financial crisis. BMW got the money then because U.S. policymakers saw a larger issue at stake: saving the economy from going over a cliff. Just as there's a larger issue involved at Ontario, which is saving the American middle class from going over the same cliff.

The Ontario union, Teamsters Local 495, got Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Reps. Joe Baca (D-Rialto) and Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) to write painfully polite letters to Jim O'Donnell, chairman of BMW North America, asking him to reconsider.

Okay, now stop.  Let's consider a few things:

1. Perhaps the union can contact representatives whores Boxer, Baca, and Sanchez and ask why they made the loan to BMW.
2. Getting a loan and paying it back at a negotiated rate of interest is not taking the "largesse" of the United States - it's called a business transaction.
3. BMW's primary business is not distribution of goods, such as, say, Fedex - it is the design and manufacturing of top end vehicles.  Thus, outsourcing a process such as this makes financial sense.  Not paying someone $25 an hour, a rate not based on the actual value of the work but a union contract.
4. Doesn't it make sense to lend money to businesses with sound fiscal practices?
5. Perhaps the union should look at Sacramento and ask why BMW used the money it borrowed in part to expand its assembly plant in South Carolina - could it have been because states such as California are not friendly to businesses?

I have some sympathy to the 50+ year old workers now forced to find new work.  But my sympathy towards them is based upon they being unwitting pawns of the Teamsters.  Wise up, folks - a company that pays you more for work than it's worth cannot remain in business.  It owes you noting but under the laws of corporate governance, it owes its shareholders.

And there is nothing wrong with that.  Treasure your labor and learn how to use it as a commodity rather than allow union bosses exploit it.