Congressional Republicans want UAW concessions

As the Big Three automakers prepare this week to go back to Congress a second time to plead for a rescue package that will keep them afloat in hard economic times, Senate Republicans are demanding that the UAW make concessions to lower labor costs. Automotive News reports:

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., a moderate hoping to help Detroit, told Automotive News the UAW will have to join auto executives in making sacrifices. Likely to be targeted by Bond and other Republicans: the Jobs Bank — the UAW equivalent, in the public’s mind, of corporate jets.

“Management, workers and investors are going to have to make sacrifices if they truly want to turn around their companies enough to earn taxpayer help,” Bond told Automotive News last week in an e-mail message.

The Jobs Bank requires the Detroit 3 to pay nearly full wages to hourly workers who have been laid off. Although the number of workers in the Jobs Bank has dwindled, the concept has become a powerful symbol of auto industry excess.

General Motors is likely to propose its elimination, says a source familiar with the company’s thinking.

Last week Bond did not spell out precisely which concessions he expects from the UAW. But during the congressional debates, many GOP lawmakers singled out the Jobs Bank as a wasteful Detroit 3 practice.

The article notes that the Job Bank costs the Big Three automakers nearly half a billion dollars every year. Bond has joined with Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow to sponsor a bill that would convert an already passed program $25 billion package to help the automakers retool their factories to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles into an emergency loan package, with the retooling money to be replaced later.