It's highly unpredictable what's going to happen. What unites everyone that's going to do something [today] is they are making visible their strong feelings. |
It's unclear if it's a route to a better job or to a more educated unemployment. |
Labor is in some pretty tough rapids right now. |
Losing 30,000 jobs, closing 14 plants, has enormous consequences not just for the union, but for the future of their members. It is a major blow. |
Many companies are looking to roll back benefits, and benefits for retirees are at the top of the list. This decision says that while they may be first on the list, they may not be easy to cut. |
Miller has clearly chosen bankruptcy over collective bargaining to restructure the company. Delphi is using a bankruptcy judge to begin moving in the direction of Chinese wages and benefits. |
Miller, by taking such a visible and hard line, may have underestimated the UAW. The union would like to see a settlement, but not at the cost of 60 years of gains. |
Northwest could become the next Eastern. |
Steve Miller has gone from a provocative after-dinner speaker to a negotiator. It's definitely a U-turn. |
The CAW, given the context, has done very well. The boat is afloat and upright after going through the rapids. They wanted to protect their members. |
The close vote tells us there's a lot of anger and apprehension out there. |
The corporation knows the sensitivity of these kinds of issues, they have a lot of experience with what will provoke a local strike. What I suspect they (the GM management) didn't anticipate is that it would reach this intensity. |
The court cases reflect that the rat has made its claw marks felt. |
The global economy has become a blast furnace that seeks to eliminate many of the gains that steelworkers have won over the years. |
The hotels are confronting a union that has significantly more leverage and more imagination than in the past. The union is slowly but surely introducing national bargaining in an industry in which the companies used to tower over the local unions. |