Category Archives: political economy

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.

Crippling under “Migrant” Crisis

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New York City Progressive-Democratic Party Mayor Eric Adams thinks the city is crippl[ing] under monumental budget cuts due to a migrant crisis straining public resources.

Adams is either entirely duplicitous in this, or he really is that oblivious to the facts staring him in the face, or he’s consciously turning his face away from what’s going on along our southern border (duplicitous along a different axis). In the first place, he’s not inundated with migrants, he’s getting a small flow of illegal aliens.

To the extent they are “straining public resources,” it’s because, first, the city never has taken public resource availability seriously—see the high level of homelessness before the small flow of illegals began. Second, that “strain” is because he’s chosen to divert those resources away from city residents in favor of supporting those illegals, who have no call on any American resources other than those any detention facility must provide for its inmates.

Aside from that, his city does not, in fact, have an illegal alien crisis. The cities and towns and villages along our southern border have an illegal alien flood crisis. They’re the ones who have to deal with high and increasing flow of illegals across our border.

To further illustrate the manufactured nature of his hysteria, this is what Adams wants to do otherwise with city—city residents’ tax—money.

He wants to remove from the city statues of heroes of our War of Independence and of our subsequent national founding; statues, for instance, of George Washington. He also wants to remove statues of figures involved in the Western World’s discovery of the New World; statues, for instance, of Christopher Columbus.

He wants to create a reparations task force.

He wants anti-racism training for human services contractors and city employees.

All that while pushing for budget cuts—because all those illegal aliens “migrants” of his are costing so much to welcome into his sanctuary city.

Cowardice in DoE

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Recall that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tried a cross-country trip in her electric vehicle convoy and that, along the way on a hot and humid Georgia day, a staffer driving a gasoline-powered vehicle blocked off an EV charging station so that when the rest of Granholm’s group arrived, one of the EVs in her convoy would have a place to recharge. Police were called over the behavior by a separate EV driver who needed a charge and had a small baby in the car.

Last Tuesday, Granholm was called to testify before the House Science and Technology Committee about that incident among other items. Responding to Congressman Scott Franklin’s (R, FL) question about the incident, Granholm said,

Let me just say, I have a fantastic young staff, just fantastic. It was poor judgment on the part of the team.

Fair enough, openly acknowledging the error like that.

But when pressed by Franklin,

Granholm also sidestepped blame during the back-and-forth with Franklin on Thursday, saying that it was not her that was “saving the spot.”

But whose error, again? Isn’t she the one in charge? Wasn’t her fantastic young staffer only acting within the department culture and associated imperatives that she has consciously developed during her tenure?

This is the arrogance of Government above all, and the MFWIC of DoE above all of that. Not her fault; she’s the one in charge, she’s not one of the worker bees who, you know, actually do things.