Monthly Archives: September 2023

Temp Workers at Car Manufacturers

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The UAW objects to American car manufacturers having temp workers on the payroll.

The use of temporary factory workers at the Detroit car companies has long rankled the United Auto Workers union, which wants fewer of them and a faster path to full-time status.

Never mind that

Automakers say they need the flexibility that temp workers provide, especially as they manage a tricky and costly transition to electric vehicles and confront the ups and downs of factory production.

The union pretends to object on the grounds of the different pay levels temps earn compared to union workers. This is cynically disingenuous. The temps know, going in, that they’re getting a lower wage than their full-time, unionized neighbor on the assembly line. They still take the gig, because they’d like to have the income. That’s an income the UAW wants to deny them, along with denying the car manufacturers these labor gap fillers.

The union boss, Shawn Fain, claims to want to help the temps:

UAW President Shawn Fain has said he wants to get temps better pay and limit their use. He also wants to accelerate the timeline to full-time status to 90 days.

But he doesn’t want them working at all until he and his union get their way. This is demonstrated by the outlandish demand of full-time status for temps within 90 days. That’s far too short to evaluate a worker’s fitness over the longer haul, and it’s far too short relative to longer-lasting but still temporary labor gaps.

In the end, temp workers are the most reliable workers on the car makers’ factory floors—the UAW’s strike, especially as damage maximizing as the present one is designed to be—demonstrates this conclusively. Fain’s demand regarding temp workers is just another union power grab.

Nice Company You Got There

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Shawn Fain, UAW union boss, is extending his threat to Ford, GM, and Stellantis, the three major American car companies against which he’s taken selective strike action, a selectivity he’s said he’s using to maximize current damage to the companies.

…what the union calls a “stand up strike,” in which specific locals are asked to go on strike at their facilities. The union has said that strategy will give it flexibility in escalating the strike incrementally up to a potential nationwide strike if negotiations do not deliver sufficient progress in its view, and will make it harder for the auto companies to predict its next move.

Give us what we want, or else:

further strikes will be announced if negotiations do not yield sufficient progress by Friday.

And so they did. The union struck additional plants at GM and Stellantis. Not Ford, though–Fain is claiming that Ford was “serious about reaching a deal,” and so he didn’t order a strike expansion there. Sure. More likely, this is just an attempt to sow dissension among the automakers and thereby add to pressure to surrender.

Be too bad if something was to happen to your company(s).

Continuing His Father’s Virtue-Signaling

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Prince William is royally frustrated with the pace of “climate” solutions and wants them developed and executed faster.

For now, we’re quite keen on the scale…when we scale up [solutions], how can we have the biggest change? For me, that’s something I haven’t quite cracked yet, is “how do we scale faster?”
I’m impatient with all this. You guys provide the product…the inspiration, the solution, my role is to get you as big, as fast, and as scalable as possible…. We’ve still got some work to do on that.

First, though, William needs to demonstrate that there is, actually, a crisis. The idea that storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, etc are getting steadily worse has long since been debunked.

Then there’s the fact that the plethora of climate models have consistently exaggerated the degree of predicted global warming over the last 25+ years they’ve been making their predictions—in fact, there’s been very little global warming. And those models still cannot even simultaneously predict the past and the present.

Then there’s the fact that the climate mavens’ go to source, the UN’s IPCC, has used the highly unlikely worst case scenario to push for zero atmospheric carbon emissions “right damn now,” while desperately ignoring the much more likely middle scenario which predicts…meh.

Then there’s the larger picture:

  • we’re 11.5k years after the end of the last severe glaciation (and still in middle of the latest Ice Age, which began some 2.8 million years ago), and we’re still cooler than the geologic warming trend line*, and much cooler than the warming excursion of 6k, or so, years ago
  • ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica that reach back 400k years indicate the atmospheric CO2 increases coincident with or after planetary warming, not before
  • there are epochs in which Earth was much warmer than today, and life was lush; there are epochs where atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today, and life was lush; those epochs do not correlate with each other—indeed, there are epochs of high temperature and low atmospheric CO2 and periods of high atmospheric CO2 and low temperature, along with high levels of each and low levels of each
  • there are epochs with no Artic ice sheet and a greatly reduced Antarctic ice sheet, and life was lush.

If the prince doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a climate crisis, instead of just blindly repeating what members of the climate funding industry tell him, he is just virtue-signaling and needn’t be taken seriously, no matter his august nobility.

 

*The trend line is very noisy, but Earth is warming, and has been since it began—because our sun has been warming ever since it gravitationally collapsed far enough to light off its fusion process.

“Employment Violence”

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Boston University has laid off some 15 staffers of the university’s Center for Antiracist Research. BU’s School of Social Work Clinical Assistant Professor and faculty lead for education and training at the Center for Antiracist Research, Phillipe Copeland, claims that’s violence.

This act of employment violence and trauma is not just about individual leaders. It’s about the cultures and systems that allow it to occur. And too often rewards it. Antiracism is not a branding exercise, PR campaign or path to self-promotion. It is a life and death matter[.]

Never mind that the Center remains a strongly going concern (for good or ill), and its founder, Dr Ibram X Kendi, remains its Director.

Copeland went on:

Taking a program [he’d resigned from the Center and founded Fellowship program otherwise within the Center] from the Black faculty member that created it is apparently what BU considers “antiracism” and “diversity and inclusion.”

And that gives the game away. The idea that only a Black person can teach matters regarding Blacks—which necessarily involve whites, Hispanics, Americans with Asian heritages—is itself a most insidious form of racism.

Still, if this is what employment “violence” looks like to the Woke, the fastest and most direct way to mitigate that violence, if not to eliminate altogether, is for employers, Boston University in particular, to not hire these folks in the first place.

A Couple of Thoughts re Yakima

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Yakima is a city in central Washington, and its Progressive-Democratic Party mayor, Janice Deccio, claims she’s being harassed since the release of her 911 call regarding some petition signature gatherers who were gathering at a Walmart. Yes, the mayor made an emergency call over petitioners gathering signatures and exercising their 1st Amendment right to petition government.

Her call:

There’s some far right-wing petitioners at Walmart, and they don’t—they’re not leaving. Walmart has asked them repeatedly to do so, and the police have not taken them off the premises.

Never mind that the police—and they told her so during her 911 call—absent a court order that Walmart had not bothered to seek, had no authority to remove the signature gatherers, not when the activity is occurring on public property or on private property that’s intended for public use, like shopping malls and store fronts.

Later, Deccio claimed she was unaware of all the nuances of the law at that time, though, and, in hindsight, I could have waited to hear from the chief. That’s risible. She’s the mayor, of course she knows the laws applicable to her role. Or she’s ignorant, having skipped or slept through, which is the same thing, her junior high Civics class, to the point of unfitness for office.

Her decision not to wait on actual answers is all too typical of the arrogance of Party politicians: obey me, subjects, and quit arguing.

That’s one (where have I heard that before?).

The group that was gathering petition signatures is Let’s Go Washington, and these are the sort of initiative for which they’re working (it’s unclear for what initiative they were gathering signatures at the Walmart):

  • I-2113, which would roll back some restrictions on when police officers can engage in vehicular pursuits
  • I-2117, to prohibit state agencies from imposing any type of carbon tax-credit trading
  • I-2124, which would allow employees to opt out of the state’s long-term care insurance program
  • I-2109, to repeal the state’s capital gains tax
  • I-2111, which would prohibit state and local jurisdictions from imposing income taxes
  • I-2081, which would allow parents of public school students to review instructional materials and student records upon request

That a Progressive-Democratic Party politician thinks such center-right positions are far right-wing clearly demonstrates how Left-extremist Party has gone.

That’s two.