“Chutzpah” is a great Yiddish term for nerve — as in having the nerve to ask something outrageous. The classic illustration of chutzpah is a man who murders his parents, then at trial throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
But what word would you use to describe the person who not only murders his parents but consumes their body parts, then goes to an adoption agency in search of new ones? I suppose the best we can do is say he has “hyper-chutzpah.”
This is about the best description possible of Bob King, the new head of the United Auto Workers union. A recent Wall Street Journal piece recounts how King is trying to present the UAW as a helpful partner, deserving of adoption by the workers and management of foreign automakers with plants in the US (mainly located in the right-to-work states).
King’s pitch is pure hyper-chutzpah. He avers, “Our mindset is not adversarial. Our agenda is a positive one of shared responsibility and shared prosperity.” His pitch is part of the UAW’s attempt to unionize the foreign-owned plants, something it has consistently failed to do over the past three decades.
It is doubtful that many workers will fall for this transparently duplicitous pitch. Most workers understand that the UAW has a pernicious history. Yes, it got “great” concessions out of the domestic producers: not just outrageously high compensation packages but unsustainable pension and health plans. Also, the UAW extorted contracts that enabled work rules protecting lazy, drunken, or otherwise incompetent workers, as well as featherbedding — including obscene rules that required workers laid off from any plant that should happen to be closed down to be kept on at full pay, sitting around playing cards in holding tanks.
The UAW has nearly destroyed the domestic auto industry. Two of the three companies it drove to the wall had to be rescued at the cost of tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, a transfer from all of our pockets to the pockets of the UAW thieves. In so doing, it has hurt itself. Its membership, once as high as a million and a half, is now only about a third of that. And if its Fairy Godpresident, Obama, loses in 2012, the next administration will be far less willing to rip off the taxpayers and creditors and give it whatever it wants.
In the face of broad public (and worker) awareness of its destructive behavior in the past, the precipitous decline in its membership over the past few decades, and the rapid deflation of the power of its political ark (i.e., the Democratic Party), the UAW is offering some olive branches. It has backed off from the demand for card check legislation (which would eliminate secret ballots in unionization votes), and is offering to help get the long-delayed free-trade agreement with South Korea though Congress.
All this is like Obama’s recent assertions that he wants to work with business, perhaps lowering regulations and corporate taxes a bit. But in truth, it is all a bunch of BA — bland assurance. It is empty happy-talk by people who despise business and the free market economy in which it thrives. The UAW has permanently crippled our domestic auto industry, handing over a major area of manufacturing, in which we once led the world, to foreign companies. Worse, it has used workers' union dues to finance the election of an endless number of leftist Democratic politicians, who have been crucial in crippling our energy industry, taking over our health industry, and hobbling other industrial sectors as well.
We can only hope that workers and management at the healthy foreign-owned auto companies will give the UAW the cold shoulder it deserves. The nation needs to tell this greedy, soulless, statist, power-hungry, job-killing gang of kleptocrats what Cromwell told the Rump Parliament: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
