Dead Squirrels Aren't Much Fun? A dissenting opinion

Reality Hits You Hard, Bro.

Last week I posted George Lindell's description of his car accident. He's probably the fastest growing meme on the web. What a great catchphrase.

Oh the Humanity - Toyota Commercial

The Haters Have Their Say -

Detroit Free Press Cackles with Glee over GM's Legal Services Benefit Elimination

It's clear which way the political wind is blowing. Joe Public is behind the race to the bottom in wages and benefits. Check out this one-sided article in the Detroit Free Press talking about the proposed elimination of the legal services benefit in the GM contract. When you're done with the articles, read the comments.

Whatever Happened to Jeff Spicoli? He had an accident

UAW-GM Contract - If You Need Me, I'll Be Under the Bus

Well, my last post was on the prospects of a UAW Contract. I got it partially correct. Little or no raise - check. Significant signing bonus ($5000), check. Slowly closing the gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 workers, check. Give and take on benefits - check. They are getting some new work. Good, they need that. Wow, they're getting composite fillings and wigs for cancer patients. Uh oh, something has to go - what about legal services? Oh, no, here comes the bus.

Here's the link to the tentative contract. I couldn't find the legal services provision through Adobe Reader. (You'd think it updates often enough to have a clue when indexing a big document, but apparently not.) Here's the entire language on the subject from the summary

Legal Services plan

All current plan benei ts will

remain in force until Dec. 31,

2013. At that time, any pending

legal matters will be processed to

their conclusion

There you have it. I posted in the members area for my fellow Afscme3357 areas who want a place to express themselves.

What we need is a good pep talk.

My Predictions for the UAW Contract

 The UAW's bargaining with the Detroit 3 is in high gear right now. There are news stories saying that the UAW will be pressured to take no wage increase and others saying the UAW is going for a 10% signing bonus. I have some educated guesses on the outcome. This is an unusual environment right now. All three automakers are currently profitable, but the economy as a whole is sick with unemployment over 9%. This means that If the uses its strongest card, the strike, it is likely to face a significant backlash from the public for being greedy in a time of unemployment. On the other hand, the UAW has to justify its existence by using the collective bargaining process to obtain a tangible benefit. Added to the difficulties, the UAW has three diverse constituencies which have divergent objectives. First are the mainstream long term workers. They have seen their real earnings decline since the past contract due to give backs. Many of them have gone through transfers and relocations. They want to recover some or all of their lost purchasing power. The second group are the "Tier 2" workers. They only make about half of what the mainstream workers make. The Tier 2 workers cannot support families on their earnings, and they resent making half the wage of the people with whom they work side by side. Finally, there are the retirees. They don't have voting rights, but in the ballot, they are represented by the large number of soon-to-retire workers who share their stake in the outcome of the contract. The retirees are still steaming over decreased health coverage and higher deductibles that came with the last contract.

 Given these factors, here's where I think the bargain will be struck. The UAW will settle for a very small base wage increase, maybe only 1%, for the tier 1 (older) workers. All of the employees will get a significant signing bonus, but it will be well less than 10%, and the signing bonus will vary depending on the automaker with Ford getting the highest Bonus and Chrysler workers getting the lowest bonus. The tier 2 workers will come out with the biggest gain, probably narrowing the wage gap by as much as a half by the end of the contract. Fringe benefits will be little changed overall, with a cut in one place being balanced by an increase somewhere else. The retirees will get basically nothing. Feel free to put your two cents in the comments.

Making the Most of My Last Weekend of Summer

This is the last real weekend of the summer for me. On Tuesday, my kids go back to school thanks to summer-hating grinches that run the school system. I'm looking at my list of things that I was going to get accomplished this summer. Actually, I never actually finished the list, but I did start it. I was going to get some things done this weekend, but I decided I'd watch two Youtube videos first. I think I might have picked the wrong videos.

Standard & Poors ****s America

Last week's stock market mini-crash wiped out all the gains we had made in our 401k plans for the year. Today, Standard & Poors downgraded the United States' credit rating due to inability to meaningfully address the budget deficit through the political process. The stock market has reacted by driving stocks down even further. In other words, S&P screwed you. Of course, this isn't the first time. Incompetence by S&P and the other credit rating companies was a big contributor to the financial meltdown that sucked so much wealth out of the economy and caused the Great Recession in the first place. Robert Kuttner lays into S&P in this Huffington Post editorial:

You have to hand it to Standard and Poor's. Forget their two-trillion dollar math error. The whole idea that these clowns are evaluating the creditworthiness of the United States is just loony.

For starters, these are the same people who brought us the crisis, by blessing junk sub-prime loans as AAA securities. And they did so because they were paid as consultants by the same financial scoundrels who created the securities.

The executives of the credit rating companies -- not "agencies," for these are private, profit-making, essentially unregulated companies, not public entities -- belong in prison.

Robert Kuttner was the keynote speaker in last year's National Consumer Rights Conference. This year the conference will be in Chicago on November 3-6. This is within driving range for over half of the UAWLSP staff attorneys. If you have the opportunity, you should make it a point to attend. I guarantee that you'll learn a lot.

The good news is that the Federal Reserve did not drink from S&P's fountain of Kool-aid and has held down the rates for long-term treasury bonds. If this keeps up, the rating downgrade's affect on the cost of credit for everyday loans might end up being minor or insignificant.

So you think YOU know how to Parallel Park?

Can you park between two cars with just 26cm clearance? (That's a little over 10 inches.) A German fellow named Ronny Wechselberger can do it and is now in the Guinness Book of World Records.



There are actually quite a few awesome parking videos on Youtube. Go ahead, waste your life.