Detroit Versus The UAW

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 11, 11:51PM EST

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University professors and the press are saying that the UAW and the Big Three are on a collision course. With woker buyouts from Ford and GM and bankruptcies at large parts suppliers, the UAW may be facing its last stand as a large labor union when 2007 negotiations begin.

One of the UAWs problems is that workers at Asian and European car-maker plants in the US don’t want to join the union. Maybe they see that if you join you get laid off. One professor at Clark University put it well: "They’re really not making the significant inroads in there just to offset the buyouts. They would have to organize 60,000 or 70,000 workers in a very short time. Then they know there will be additional plant closures."

Some union executives hope that the Democrats will rescue them, but that would probably involve helping the car companies directly.

Not likely.

Douglas A McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.