We have Ford dying, along side GM now they talk about merging, delaying the inevitable. Very much the way north american made televisions and cameras went.

The CAW was rejected recently by the JAW, due to conflicting cultures within the unions.

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Originally posted by Billie Bob:

Manufacturing in North American is on it's last legs and our labour rate and productivity is the cause. Canada now ranks 37th in the world based upon productivity/efficiency per person working. When you consider our manufacturing sectors and that 40% of our work force work for the government you can see why. These are unionized shops and by design Unions are not breeding grounds for productive, efficient workers.

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It started years ago but it seems the end is near.

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! For folks that are actually paying attention to this crap, you should know that this type of bogus wishful thinking by tyrants and their apologists has been going on for centuries.

That's right--all the way back to the totalitarian Pharaoh Ramses II, who said that no communal association should continue to exist under his perfect rule.

Some time after, he was forced to make huge concessions during a huge slave revolt, and no matter how harsh he got, the craftsmen refused to finish his pyramid before his death.

The Roman emperor Claudius tried the same thing, which sparked the infamous plebian revolt, followed by the historic "grand apology"

The British monarchy led huge persecutions of peasant groups and guilds in the 1300s. The backlash was almost a century of rebellion and loss of productivity, forcing Richard to draft the Magna Carta, which, at least on paper, recognized that lower classes had rights.

Same thing happened in Europe as tyrants and bosses ruthlessly cracked down on guilds and cooperative democratic townships (known as communes). What was the backlash? The Renaissance and the British Reformation.

In 1794, after a brutal coup by elite capitalist merchants, the French government declared all guilds and unions illegal. Five years later, they were overthrown in the second Bastille.

Napoleon did it again about 15 years later. We know what happened to him. Then there was the Paris Commune.

The British aristocracy did it. The backlash was that they were forced to abolish slavery and eventually give the vote to everyone.

The Bismarck in Germany tried it--20 years of civil war followed.

It goes on. Hitler tried it. Stalin tried it. Fascist police states and their corporate backers all across the globe have tried it, and Corporate America keeps trying it.

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These are unionized shops and by design Unions are not breeding grounds for productive, efficient workers.

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Garbage. Read any report on this, like the ones from Statistics Canada that show year after year, union workers enjoy far greater productivity in general than non-union workers. Obviously, rates vary from sector to sector at different times for a variety of reasons, but generally it’s union=more productive.

[URL] http://www.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ322/orazem/Wage%20Differentials.ppt#269[/URL]
[URL] http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/6803.html[/URL]
[URL] http://papers.nber.org/papers/w9473[/UR:]

This is not only because union workers are generally better paid, but also mostly better trained, with more job security and career advancement opportunities (in some sectors they also have more employment options, depending on unionization rates on a sector by sector basis). That means they can invest more effort and skills into the job, since, at least in part, they know they will likely still have it in a year.

I know that corporate liars and apologists like the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives don’t like to see this. But it’s true.

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Manufacturing in North American is on it's last legs and our labour rate and productivity is the cause.

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BS. Anyone who looks at what's happened in the last 30 years can see that government policies designed to expand corporate investment into cheap labour sweatshops under dictatorships of various kinds in order to generate quick cash fall profits for elites corporate heads, shareholder clubs and banks.

http://www.alternet.org/story/12447/
[URL] http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000019.html[/URL]

[/URL] http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=1369[/URL]

Has the cost of living in North America gone down as the result of the destruction of the manufacturing sector and imports from Third World sweatshops?

Nope, it's gone up, as has wide-spread personal and consumer debt and declining consumer savings and retirement security. People are getting poorer. That's what happens with the declining percentage of the unionized work force.

[URL] http://www.epinet.org/newsroom/releases/2006/060124Faux-pr-final.pdf#search=%22Declining%20North%20American%20Living%20Standards%22[/URL]

[URL] http://www.epinet.org/static/books_swa2004_main.cfm[/URL]

Those products themselves are not much cheaper. But the huge mark-ups are a massive free lunch for corporate tyrannies.

[URL] http://rfs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/805[/URL]
[URL] http://papers.nber.org/papers/w5862[/URL]

But just how stupid and destructive these types of crony capitalist economics are was proven again with the Asian crash of the late 1990s, which sent resource commodity prices into a tail-spin. That whole crash, according to at least three economic reports by the US government, was that some big time investment bosses realized that, thanks to falling wages and declining spending power, North American consumer markets were hardly expanding at all (and still aren't very much)--to the point that they were stagnant relative to the huge capital and finance investment in Third World sweatshop production.

That meant these greed-heads realized that the slow consumer markets would not allow for profitable rates of return on all those trillions of dollars taken out of the relatively higher wage economies here over the years by corporate bosses and invested in the Third World.

SO all of a sudden, they all wanted to pull their cash out of Asia and buy up Green Backs, driving up the US dollar and threatening to push interest rates up to depression era levels.

[URL] http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn731asiaed[/URL]
[URL] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1866973[/URL]
[URL] http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/16cAsia.html[/URL]

That's when guys like Allan Greenspon of the US Federal Reserve, defied the IMF and World Bank and lowered interest rates and to hell with inflation worries. Everyone else followed suit, and that's why the whole industrialized world hasn't collapsed.

The Asian crash was a warning. Since then wages and living standards in North America have continued to drop, as have personal savings and retirement security, and personal debt is at an historic high--as the labour movement, especially in the US, has been largely unable to reverse this trend due to harsh repression by corporate tyrants and their puppet governments.

The next one that hits is going to be a whopper of a crash--thanks once again to the greedy profiteering parasitic tyrannies that dictatorially control our economy and their puppet right-wing regimes.

But, again, in the long term, all is not lost.

According to the ILO, labour militancy and union membership and innovation are on the rise, especially around the fundamental of democratizing businesses and the economy and social democratic reforms.

http://www.ilo.org/

In Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and even China itself, increased union activity and interest in worker ownership and community based business is on the rise. And in places like Japan and Korea, after taking a hammering in the 1990s, union rates are up and wages rates and living standards are either rising or generally holding their own overall (depending on the sector).

Throughout South America, increased union membership and the resulting elections of social democratic and center-left coalition governments in these newly emerging states has started a slow but relatively steady rise in living standards and personal a political freedoms—and economic democracy, to one extent of another, is an express part of their electoral mandates. (especially in Argentina with outright worker take-overs of factories and Venezuela, where the government is investing huge sums of capital in financing worker buy-outs and cooperative development).

Even in parts of Africa and Eastern Europe, and in a more structured way in Italy, france, Spain and Holland this is happening in various ways with the usual results of increased living standards and working conditions and greater economic and personal freedom.