Ark,
It really is not the UAW that prevents the companies from designing, marketing and producing a competitive product.
See the thing is when you really look at the offerings of the GM or Ford, there is not a lot there for the price. The quality, even with GM has fallen more and they failed to invest into the plants here in the states and won't and they really are not on the cutting edge of anything with anything really new.
(for example GM has been promoting US's first production hybrid pickup truck but they fail to mention that the truck has been in production since early 2003 and the same with their false statements that they lead in electric car technology and hybrid technology without no electric car on the market or very few hybrids.)
In reality all of this has to do with market share but they don't at any moment fail to make money - don't let that fool you.
Here is my long rambling rant, be prepared.....
Once upon a time, a long time ago there are a fat lazy idiot auto worker who was laid off in flint. He decided he was not going to sit around and become fatter at the same time living off of his unemployment and UAW benefits but really do something - he became a 'film maker' and his name is Micheal Moore. He targeted one person to ask him why he was laid off and promised that he would help his beloved city. He also in turn how to edit film to make it look the way he wanted it to and get his message in it.
Well his target was Roger Smith, the company that employed his lazy a** and the film was Roger and Me. It had a lot of lies in it, some made up by Moore, and Moore refused to tell the truth that he met with Smith on more than one occasion.
BUT Roger Smith, the evil Roger Smith and the bigger evil GM was in front of the congress talking about real issues in the '70s that the country faced, and one thing that he was clear about was that the embedded taxes that was in every vehicle that is produce will kill off the auto companies and.....
.........the fact is, that Evil Roger Smith is 100% right.
The reason that a lot of movement from Ford and GM to complain about health care, wages and talk about closing plants is because of Taxes. They are moving to the enterprise zones on the Mexican border, they are moving to China and to India because those countries don't have the taxes we do. So it is not just because of the cost of labor in the car but in fact it is because the companies here can't afford to update their factories or even build new ones because of the complexity of the tax system we have here that prevents them from doing so. Honda, Toyota and others are building new plants and they are moving things into the country without paying a lot of tariffs and taxes on the equipment because 1 - they lease a lot of the equipment and the life cycle is short which means that they replace the equipment regardless what the condition is at a very specific time 2 - once they replace the old equipment with the new equipment, the old stuff gets sent back to the country it came from and the tariffs are covered as part of the cost of leasing the machinery. There is no inventory or equipment tax paid, there is a direct write off on the equipment and so on.
And if you don't beleiove me about the enterprise zones, when you are in the San Diego area, go to Otay Mesa and look around. See who is down there and if you deliver there, watch what is going on, ask some of them how much they make.
So in closing I would like to have all to go and read about the
Fair tax. This is really the only way to save our manufacturing base here.
Oh by the way, Micheal Moore got fatter, he broke all the promises he made to Flint to help them and has become just another liberal talking head. You all should go meet him.
