Sen. Corker and the irrational labor boss

NY Times:

For more than 70 years, the United Automobile Workers union has known who its adversaries were: company executives, foreign automakers and right-to-work advocates who fought its organizing drives.

Now it has another: Senator Robert Phillips Corker Jr.

On Thursday night, Senator Corker, a freshman Republican from Tennessee, pushed the U.A.W.’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, to agree in principle to tough contract concessions before the Senate Republicans would agree to provide a lifeline to General Motors and Chrysler.

But Mr. Gettelfinger, after giving ground in recent years on health care, job security and pay issues, would not agree to let the concessions take effect next year. The impasse effectively killed the chances for a $14 billion bailout package from Congress.

...

On Friday, Senator Corker took pains to dispel notions that the outcome was the result of sharp split between his party and organized labor, or that it was engineered by lawmakers from states that are home to foreign auto manufacturers.

“I was a member of a union as a young man, a card-carrying union member,” Senator Corker, who was a construction worker, said at a news conference. “My company that I started when I was 25 employed large numbers of union workers — carpenters, laborers and others.”

And Mr. Gettelfinger acknowledged during his own press conference that he had been willing to reach an agreement with Senator Corker on the concept of lowering U.A.W. members’ wages and benefits to the levels paid at plants run by Toyota, Honda, B.M.W. and Nissan.

The two sides wound up apart only by the date when concessions might take effect — 2009, as the senator wanted, or 2011, as Mr. Gettelfinger proposed, when the next union contract takes effect. But Mr. Gettelfinger refused to yield completely to Congress; yielding would allow lawmakers to tell U.A.W. members what they could earn or what the terms of their contract would be.

Mr. Gettelfinger said he suspected that was the prime motivation of Southern Senate Republicans — not helping the auto companies.

“They thought that they had a two-fer: pierce the heart of organized labor, while representing the foreign manufacturers,” Mr. Gettelfinger said.

...

The idea that making Detroit autoworkers competitive with those working for foreign manufacturers benefits the foreign manufacturers is just nuts. What Corker was doing was making easier for the Big Three to sell their cares competitively with the foreign builders who have a lower cost structure.

How does it help the foreign manufacturers to have their domestic competitors have the same labor costs? Aren't they already better off competing against the higher cost structure of GM etc.? Isn't organized labor better off with jobs that pay less than no jobs at all?

What Gettelfinger was doing was passing up a twofer that was to the benefit of his members in hopes of some short term bailout that would only put forward the day of reckoning and he was asking the workers with lower wages to fund the extension.