And, as I said, the UAW leadership is outright terrible – in my experience, there are only one or two other unions that are in its ballpark in terms of corruption and failing to truly look out for its membership’s best interests.

Now, perhaps you could say that ultimately the problems caused by bad labor deals are the fault of management, who agreed to the bad labor deals. Which certainly has a lot of truth to it. But if that’s the case, then we’re left with a conclusion that labor unions, particularly the UAW, have a pretty strong hand when it comes to dealings with management, and thus don’t need additional legislation to make that hand even stronger.

I disagree. It was Detroit that chose not to compete with foreign companies in the smaller car market, otherwise known in the parlance of recent times as “cars that sell”. Where is GMs answer to the Toyota Yaris or Honda Fit? The Chevy Aveo? Please. As for Ford, I’ve driven their Focus and that car is a piece of shit as well.

And where is GM or Ford’s answer to the Toyota Prius? We’re all still waiting for that one — we’ve been waiting for a decade.

GM et al. don’t have a viable product on the market to sell right now. Their product line is geared towards cheap gasoline but they didn’t have a plan for high gas prices. The UAW can’t be a scapegoat for poor management.

I disagree, however, with:
But no one who is opposed to the bailout thinks that Detroit’s problems are just the result of the unions,

In fact, much of the hyperventilation about how the Big Three got into so much trouble centers precisely around the unions, and most especially the union workers’ rates of pay and the benefits extended (by contract) to retirees.

This has been the mantra of senators from right-to-work states with Japanese, Korean, or European auto plants. That their hidden agenda is to turn public sentiment against unions in general and to weaken the UAW in particular is apparent to many of us, but the message still gets promulgated that “union workforce = need for Big Three bailout”.

Rather than sharing the stage with bad management, bad PR, and poor market research, the efforts to blame the UAW deflect attention from other, more pervasive, reasons for the demise of the Big Three. It is for precisely that reason that I thought the David Leonhart article was so significant.

Second of all – the per car argument is much more important. Here, he acknowledges that at least $800 per car is added due to the UAW’s influence, which is not chump change.

This is not to say that Detroit’s problems are solely the result of union leadership. However, to say that the UAW is free from blame here is not accurate, either. Indeed, just as there can be good and bad management, there can also be good and bad unions – and, as far as unions go, the UAW’s leadership is about as bad as it gets (and yes, I am more than willing to point to unions with what I think is “good” leadership).

But no one who is opposed to the bailout thinks that Detroit’s problems are just the result of the unions, only that the UAW is a significant contributing factor. But so is bad management, bad public relations, and poor market research.