Thefutureoftheunion.com features posts from delegates to the UAW Convention that is currently finishing up in Las Vegas. As expected, UAW President Ron Getelfinger was re-elected. He was unopposed.
That doesn't mean that the UAW is filled with happy campers. The Delphi people are particularly pissed. Some are ranting at thefutureoftheunion.com and suggesting that if you got to go down, go down in a blaze of glory in a strike. It's hard to tell how rational the Delphi agitators are. A strike is rational if you have something that can be gained in the strike. Before you can get to the decision whether to strike, you have to figure out whether you are in a non-zero sum game featuring sub-optimal outcomes,like the Prisoner's Dilemma,or in a no-win scenario, like the Kobayashi Maru situation.
The Delphi buy-outs suggest to me that the UAW has identified this from their perspective as a prisoner's dilemma and they have gracefully negotiated an outcome, though not optimal, is better than nothing. Some Delphi members can't accept this, because from their perspective, they feel stranded on the Kobayashi Maru.
As Monday-morning quarterbacks, folks can argue endlessly on how the UAW and the companies got into the positions they did. I found this statement interesting on the wikipedia.org entry covering "no win situation"
Some cognitive biases such as anchoring and framing, or emotional biases, such as greed, fear, and herding, are reasons why people create no-win situations which may be potentially avoidable.
Hmmm, "greed, fear, and herding", I can see each of those behaviors in the collective bargaining context. Interestingly, I see all of those behaviors in our societal approach to resource consumption versus conservation. I'm wondering if we should mandate that all high school seniors not take a course in classical economics (you know, supply, demand, yada yada) but instead, take a course in public policy economics and game theory.
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