Feb. 21, 2012 online at www.uawlocal2250.com
• From Chairman Mike Bullock: Last week I attended the UAW GM National Council meeting in Detroit. Besides the good news about our profit share payout, there was some other information to pass along. The current UAW/GM headcount stands at 48,357. There are 15 plants that have manpower needs that total 1277 and need to be filled by June 4 of this year. The highest request comes from Lansing Grand River with a need for 575 workers beginning March 5. Since May of 2009, there have been 564 members take a basic relocation package and 6028 have taken the enhanced relocation package (with roughly 880 that will fulfill their 3-year commitment between May and September this year).
• The Women’s Committee is hosting a “Women’s Heart Health” display in the cafeteria Wednesday (all day). There will be popcorn and lots of valuable heart health information, so come on up.
• From the Bangkok Post: Chevrolet intends a near tripling of its local sales to 85,000 vehicles this year, with the new Colorado pickup truck commanding the lion's share. The US-based carmaker sold some 31,000 models of all types last year, up by 58% from 2010. The new pickup truck launched last year will represent 30-40% of total 2012 sales. "The reasons why the Colorado will lead the sales are because one, the pickup truck segment is big, and two it will have a full sales year this year," said Antonio Zara, the vice-president for sales, marketing and after-sales service at General Motors Thailand and Chevrolet Sales (Thailand). He said the industry's overall pickup truck segment will move 400,000 to 500,000 units this year. Chevrolet will introduce the Trailblazer passenger pickup vehicle (PPV) and the Sonic subcompact car locally this year. Both will be built at GM Thailand's plant in Rayong province. The Trailblazer, built on the structure of the Colorado pickup truck, will be displayed at the Bangkok International Motor Show 2012 to be held at Impact Muang Thong Thani from March 26-April 8.(No word on whether the Trailblazer will be built or sold in the U.S.) The same event will also see a sneak preview of the Sonic. Mr. Zara expressed confidence the Trailblazer will not compete with the Captiva sport-utility vehicle (SUV) already available here since the product positioning of both models is different. Mr. Zara said the Trailblazer will come with a 2.5- or 2.8-litre engine, a strength that will enable it to compete with the main players in the PPV market.
• Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has been busier than a cat in a litter box trying to explain his position on the “bailouts” of GM and Chrysler. And the more he talks the more he contradicts himself. Last Thursday he gave a rambling interview to reporters of the Detroit Free Press attempting yet again the square that circle. Here is opinion writer Tom Walsh’s take on that attempt, entitled, “Can Romney Remember What he Believes?”: Mitt Romney must be on the verge of exhaustion from all the verbal contortions and mental gymnastics he puts himself through, trying to make his past words and current positions sound palatable to presidential primary voters. And I'm just talking about his stance on the auto industry bailouts, not scores of other issues. In an interview Thursday with the Free Press editorial board, on a day when General Motors reported making $7.6 billion in 2011 and announced profit-sharing checks of $7,000 per worker for hourly employees, Romney managed to: Celebrate what he called the "wonderful outcome" of GM's turnaround; Take credit for suggesting the idea of managed bankruptcies to restructure GM and Chrysler; Bash President Barack Obama for using taxpayer money to keep GM and Chrysler afloat during the process, and to accuse Obama of handing control of the companies over to the UAW. Like I said, he must be exhausted from trying to twist the facts into a narrative that sounds like he's (a) happy for Detroit autoworkers who still have jobs and are sharing in profits, but (b) also virulently anti-Obama and anti-labor-union, so as to curry favor with the GOP primary voting base. To be specific about the editorial board discussion, Romney feigned surprise and outrage that anyone might conclude from the November 2008 article he wrote for the New York Times, headlined "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," that, as president, he would have allowed GM and Chrysler to be liquidated. "That is so absurd," Romney said. Rather, he insisted, citing the second-to-last sentence in the op-ed, he would have steered the companies into managed bankruptcies -- but with loan and warranty guarantees, not tens of billions of dollars in bailout cash. And who would have made the big loans that Romney would have federally guaranteed? The private credit markets were frozen in the financial panic of late 2008 and early 2009, leading many experts to conclude that no private lender would have stepped up to finance bankruptcies as huge and risky as those of GM and Chrysler. When I pressed Romney on this point, he insisted that if the U.S. Treasury issued bonds or guarantees, plenty of private lenders would have surfaced. Even if you buy that assumption, Romney's other troubling premise is in his blithely made suggestion that Obama dictated a solution to favor his political allies -- the UAW -- and somehow ignored or subverted the existing bankruptcy process and "rule of law." This is nonsense. U.S. Bankruptcy Judges Robert Gerber and Arthur Gonzalez, in the GM and Chrysler cases, respectively, heard a host of arguments by warring factions -- auto dealers, bondholders, shareholders, etc. -- before ruling on the company restructurings. It's easy to understand Romney's tortured attempts to parse words in such a way as to seem semi-reasonable to an independent voter yet sufficiently anti-Obama and anti-labor for the GOP's staunch right wing. I even had to smile when he tried the old it-was-a-bad-headline excuse, wishing that his infamous 2008 op-ed piece had been titled "How to Save Detroit" instead of "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." One wonders if the exhausted Romney can remember at the end of the day what he actually believes.
• Programming note: ABC’s “Nightline” will air a special report on Apple’s production tonight entitled, “iFactory: Inside Apple”. It will air at 10:30 so set your recorders.
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