Detroit's Appomattox

If Southerners act in concert, their purpose must be sinister, or so says Michael Lind in his article last week in Salon, "How to End the South's Economic War on the North." The action of Senators Shelby, Corker, and McConnell to block the bailout of Detroit's Big Three cannot possibly be ascribed to a failure to understand why Toyota, Nissan, and BMW should be penalized for not raising their per-hour labor costs from $46 to Detroit's standard $71 or to add $1,500 in worker health-care costs to the price of every car, as Ford does; it must, instead, be a plot to avenge Jeff Davis and express contempt for the rest of the country. If Lind were not the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, he should be a novelist or perhaps a psychologist; while analyzing others, he might try to get a clearer insight into his own outrage over the fact that the South will not acquiesce in his contempt for the region or submit to being told what is best for it by enlightened liberals like Lind. I think this is one Whitehead that needs to be squeezed.

I take no pleasure in reading about the wasteland of Flint or the prospect of faithful and competent auto-workers being turned out into the cold because of factors over which they have no control. For that matter, I do think the Big Three must not be allowed to fail altogether, for the ripple effect both of the size of their work force and in their supplier relationships. But their prospective failure is not a plot, from the South or anywhere else, but simply a result of management's own mistakes and of competition from those who do their jobs better. Yes, it is true that the states of the old Confederacy spend less on public services such as education and healthcare than others, and that ought to be rectified; it is also true that the large payrolls made possible by foreign auto-makers in those regions help to improve the quality of life for the workers and their families (see Daniel Gross's article in the December 22 Newsweek on the economic impact of the foreign auto industry on the South). In any case, is there something sacrosanct about living in the Snow Belt? Just as Southern laborers once migrated north for better jobs, perhaps it's time for workers in Michigan to abandon their frozen habitations and do the opposite. If they come in sufficient numbers, they may even vote higher taxes for public services, if they wish.

I understand that the elephant in the room is union vs. non-union labor. Union work rules are sometimes necessary to protect the worker against the caprice of management; I remember reading the reminiscences of an early labor leader in which he recalled that no matter how bad economic conditions became, somehow, the members of the company baseball team were never included in layoffs. Unions happened because corporate management of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were as blind as GM and Chrysler management have been for some time now, and their contributions to equity in the workplace should not be simply dismissed. If union contracts eventually saddled the employer with health-care and pension obligations that can no longer be sustained, they were at least an understanding for worker and employer alike that faithful service over the employee's working life would result in comfort and economic security.

Now it is time to renegotiate all of it, if not the basic principle of mutual obligation, then the details of how such a principle can be honored in today's economy. The solution lies neither in abandoning the Detroit worker to freeze and starve nor in wild-eyed calls from the likes of Lind for a "New Reconstruction" in which the South eventually becomes as bankrupt and hamstrung as the North, but in an honest understanding between management and labor about building cars that work, that do not despoil the environment, and that the worker can afford, along with reasonable health and pension benefits. Instead of punishing Dixie for its success, others would do well to emulate it.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Color me spiritual

When will the President-elect and Mrs. Obama entertain Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Morgan Freeman at the White House? He owes a great deal to all three. His gifts and achievements are his own, and he ought to have won his office without reference to race, but racial prejudice made it necessary for these men to quietly assure fearful whites for years that African-Americans were reasonable and civilized and that your well-spoken black dinner guest would not suddenly cast away his necktie and begin an orgiastic dance on your coffee table. (When I Spy aired, National Review honored Cosby with the label, "Super Spade.") Of course, prejudice lingers still, as Memphis journalist Wendi C. Thomas sardonically noted with her pre-election column in TheRoot.com, “Will White People Riot [if McCain loses]?”

When, for that matter, will Obama invite comedian Dick Gregory who, after all, preceded the President-elect's successful campaign with his own White House bid 40 years ago? I remember listening to a recording of a Gregory routine around 1966, in which he described his fantasy of moving to a suburb and "raking the snow" while dressed in a jacket and tie, in order to be accepted by his white neighbors. Talking of his proposed residence in the White House, Gregory imagined himself answering phone calls to the Executive Mansion with a laid-back "Hey, baby!" He never got to move in, but in any case, would probably have avoided the burden about to descend on Obama, yet another subtle manifestation of race prejudice, the black man as wise spirit guide to confused and benighted whites. Bijan C. Bayne describes the phenomenon in another perceptive and provocative piece in TheRoot, "Magical Negro in Chief":

...there is something dizzying about the heights of Obama's other-worldly pedestal. And—if he continues to follow another narrative arc laid out in popular culture—the depths to which he will inevitably fall. Will this character rescue the world in the end? Or will he become consumed by an unseen, dark inner soul?

In the coming years, we will know soon enough. Until then, we can only look at the clues laid out in popular culture.

Negro Spirit Guides, magical helpers who have little interior life of their own, says E. Ethelbert Miller, literary archivist and director of the African-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University. "Their duty is to serve (whites) and to serve well. The hero of the movie often 'embraces' their blackness and comes to grips with the unknown."

Placing a feared "other" on a pedestal is of course a well-known technique for circumscribing his or her role, with a long history: men used it on women, and whites on blacks of both genders. Bayne continues:

There is a colonial tinge to this Negro Spirit Guide phenomena, according to Regina Longo, a University of California Santa Barbara film and media studies professor. Starting in the 19th century Romantic era, the spirit guide became "a way for white colonists to acknowledge a certain type of black power that is safe for the whites, that still keeps the blacks as something other than wholly human even if they are divine," Longo said. "The religion of that era said that we are all God's creatures, no matter our rung on the evolutionary ladder. That helps the whites to assuage their guilt over the institutions of slavery and racism, but rather than letting go of them, they institutionalize them through culture."

To be sure, some reasons for expecting great things of Obama are obvious. He is poised, thoughtful, articulate (and clean, as his Vice-President-to-be observed!), intelligent, prudent, pragmatic, but with principles, though his fortitude and tenacity in maintaining those principles against both Congressional barons and foreign despots have yet to be tested. And yes, we are entitled to expect capability, energy, wisdom, and sound governance, but from a mortal, not a Savior. Anyone too caught up in the current euphoria might do well to remember an example cited by Montaigne:

"The poet Hermodorus had written a poem in honour of Antigonus, wherein he called him the son of the sun: "He who has the emptying of my close-stool," said Antigonus, "knows to the contrary."

Meanwhile, beleaguered GM executives seem desperately bereft of spirit guides of any complexion; the Sun may be setting on Saturn, whose 1990 rollout was also supposed to represent "Change you can believe in." Apparently, some in GM and UAW alike really did believe:

True believers in Saturn insist the concept behind the division, which stressed respect, teamwork and communication from the factory floor to the auto showroom, could have kept G.M. from losing nearly half the market share it held when the first Saturns went on sale 18 years ago.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the Saturn way could have worked,” said Michael Bennett, the original U.A.W. leader at Saturn. “But what we had was never embraced or adopted.”

This year, Saturn sales will fall below 200,000 units for the first time since 1992 (sales have never achieved the half-million-unit annual volume that GM hoped for). Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that "General Motors has promised Congress that it can recreate itself as a different kind of car company — smaller, with a more cooperative relationship with its union, and a lineup of fuel-efficient cars to compete with the best of the foreign brands." But that is what was supposed to happen with Saturn! GM executives are hinting at "looking at alternatives"; Congress needs to do the same.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Save the jobs; sell the walnut desks

Louis XIV was dying for weeks of gangrene, and no one thought to amputate. An article in this week's Time gives specifics on the ripple effect if GM is allowed to go under.

"Although the Detroit Three directly employed about 240,000 people last year, according to the industry-allied Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, Mich., the multiplier effect is large, which is typical in manufacturing. Throw in the partsmakers and other suppliers, and you have an additional 974,000 jobs. Together, says CAR, these 1.2 million workers spend enough to keep 1.7 million more people employed."

I'm not sure Time helps its cause by inserting a link to photographs of the "50 worst cars of all time"! The same article quotes Peter Schrager, of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, saying that GM's management needs to be dismissed and the company broken up into three separate units: Chevy, Buick-Pontiac-GMC and Cadillac-Saab-Saturn. Whatever else they do, I hope they at least keep making Saturns!

Henry Payne, of the Detroit News, writing in National Review Online, also notes the shortcomings of GM as presently constituted.

"It is an open secret in the Motor City that — even leaving aside its high labor costs, surplus of brands, and bloated dealer network — GM’s manufacturing culture is inefficient compared to foreign rivals Toyota and Honda. Conversations with numerous supplier reps confirm an antiquated Detroit culture that does not thoroughly engineer products before contracting production with suppliers. As a result, production runs for Detroit automakers like GM are frequently interrupted to change specifications. Those interruptions add costs — costs that Japanese manufacturers rarely incur. The problem is so prevalent that employees for JCI — major international supplier Johnson Controls, Inc. — often joke that their acronym stands for 'Just Change It' because its American clients routinely run up unnecessary costs by altering production contracts.

"Can a $25 billion taxpayer bailout help General Motors change its culture? 'No,' says one supplier executive. 'You have to burn them down and start over.'”

I wondered if I had received my own bailout, or at least its first installment, when I opened my mail last night and found a check drawn on Wilburton State Bank of Oklahoma for nearly $5,000, accompanied by a letter from Bravo Services telling me I had won a quarter of a million dollars in an international lottery. The letter was obviously a scam, but the check looked real. The first order of business was to find out if there really is a Wilburton, Oklahoma, and there is. Next, I wondered if there really was a Wilburton State Bank and yes, that is real as well, as is the prominently displayed banner, one of the first things you see on their web site, warning you that checks from Bravo Services are fraudulent. If Saturn goes under, it looks like it will be a while before I replace my Ion with a Bentley.

An ad from Hewlett-Packard in my e-mail this morning made me blink; it said "Experience the Freedom of Wireless Printing," and I thought it said wireless painting! I wondered if there will come a time where we can't do anything unsupported by technology.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.