Sept. 27, 2010 online at www.uawlocal2250.com
From the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. government needs to sell all its stock in General Motors Co. at an average price of $133.78 a share to fully recoup the $49.5 billion it spent to rescue the auto maker, according to the Obama administration official overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program. GM was reorganized in bankruptcy court last year with the help of $49.5 billion in U.S. aid. GM has paid back $6.7 billion in cash and $2.1 billion was converted to preferred shares. An additional $1 billion went to help wind down so-called old GM. The remaining $39.7 billion has been converted into a 61% stake in the car maker. The stake amounts to 304 million GM shares. (With a 17.5% stake, the UAW health care trust fund would be worth $11.7 billion if it was sold for that average price)
From Businessweek: General Motors Co. has cut costs and improved its products so much that an analyst expects it to be "printing money" when vehicle sales return to normal in the next few years. Morningstar analyst David Whiston, in a note to investors Monday, wrote that GM's initial public stock offering, which is likely to occur in November, could be a good investment. He set a preliminary fair value of the shares at $134 each. Whiston wrote that GM finally has healthy North American operations, and saved about $3 billion a year alone when it shifted retiree health care costs to a United Auto Workers union trust fund. The company can break even before taxes even if U.S. vehicle sales slump to 10.5 to 11 million vehicles, he wrote. So far this year sales are running around 11.5 million. "We think the normative demand for U.S. light vehicles is about 16 million-17 million units, so we expect GM to be printing money as vehicle demand comes back over the next few years," he wrote.
Part one of Detroit Free Press interview with UAW President Bob King
Bob King discusses challenges in a wide-ranging interview with Free Press editors and reporters. The following is an edited account of the discussion.
QUESTION: You would think, given the things going on, and the sacrifices that workers are asked to make over and over, that this would be labor's time. ... And yet it seems like maybe the opposite is true, that labor is struggling to sort of keep traction. What's your take on that?
A: Well, I think when you are 7% of the private sector, you don't have anywhere near the clout or the leverage to win workers the fairness that they deserve.
So, I think a huge responsibility of the UAW, and every union, is to have aggressive, comprehensive strategies to organize.
Q: Do you see opportunities to expand labor's footprint?
A: Definitely. ... This is a UAW that understands the importance of global competitiveness. It is a UAW that went through this horrendous period of contraction in the industry because both labor and management had it wrong. Now I think we have it right.
Q: Was it necessary to have the near-death experience for the Detroit auto industry to get to that sort of mutual agreement around these goals?
A: Well, I think people were moving there, but I think it certainly speeded it up. It's a pretty sad statement to have to lose as many members as we did and the companies had to close as many plants as they did. But ... I'm excited that we have this foundation now. We have the ability to grow market share and grow volume and put a lot of people back to work.
Q: You've said on a couple of occasions that workers who have sacrificed a lot through the collapse of the auto industry should gain as things recover. What does that mean?
A: It's gaining financially. How we do that is an open question. ... And I think there is a pretty broad understanding that we can't bargain agreements that make the companies long-term uncompetitive. We don't want to get back into the spiral that we just got out of. ...
We have to figure a path that really gives our membership ... their fair share of the upside. ... I think our members made these huge sacrifices. I want to see when the upside is shared, it is shared on some proportionate basis.
Q: Are we at the point yet where we are getting to the upside, or are there probably some more concessions that people will have to make?
A: I don't see any more concessions in this round of bargaining. My view of the world, American manufacturing talks about being globally competitive. We buy into that, and yet American CEOs are not globally competitive. They are paid outlandishly more than anybody else in the rest of the world. So that has to be addressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment