One must admit to driver error.

J

– John O.

Even if the tire was flawed, a sober driver going the speed limit can handle a rear tire blowout.

To assign blame to the seller of the car and the installer of the tires makes no sense at all. To assign no blame to the driver is bizarre. The passengers also were partly at fault: they were drunk, they knew the driver was drunk, they got in the car anyway, and they didn’t wear lap belts and shoulder harnesses. I hate cases like this.

For the right price, you can get an “expert” witness to say whatever you want.

I never said good pay for the non-executive employee is bad; it’s not. What’s bad is excessive pay, excessive benefits and work rules that stifle productivity. The problem with the Detroit Three is not the wage rate paid to current workers – my understanding is that it’s not very far off what the
transplants pay in non-union shops. The problem is, for example, GM employs about 100,000 workers yet pays extremely generous medical and/or retirement benefits for over 1,000,000 people, If GM could rid itself of retirement benefits, it would probably be in very competitive shape. That’s the problem; it’s stuck with the deal it made under vastly different circumstances than exist today. BTW, I don’t expect $10 per hour employees to power the economy or buy new cars.

Perhaps UPS does so well because package delivery cannot be outsourced to foreign countries and its relatively few competitors have the same labor costs (how’s DHL doing?). GM, Ford and Chrysler did great 40 years ago when there was no foreign competition and their labor costs were in parity. How much would you bet that UPS will be as strong in 2049 when the “lavish bennies” come home to roost and a new competitor enters the package delivery market without the millstone of retirement benefits wrapped around its neck? This is why unionized industries are destined to fail. As for the new services and technology, obviously these are introduced by management.

I agree that the Wagner Act set up an adversarial relationship between labor and management that necessitates “constant confrontation” between the two. I don’t agree this is a good thing. While unionized companies have to devote “almost constant” time and resources to do the “extremely difficult” and “unpleasant” tasks of managing their “asses off” vis-a-vis their workforce, their non-union competitors can devote all of their time and resources to improving products and competitiveness.

Who designed and decided to build the Corvette, the Mustang, the Camaro, the Caprice, the Taurus, the F150, the Suburban, ect? To hold management to a standard of perfection; to believe that management can see the future; to suggest that they will never introduce a bomb; this is childish. Do the losses of thousands of jobs in the typewriter, adding machine, mimeograph, phonograph and VHS industries lie “entirely at the feet of the manager”? Or might there be other considerations? Times change, industries change, but when your feet are cemented in the past you can’t adopt.

I completely agree with you on immigration. There is no doubt in my mind that immigrants take jobs Americans would gladly do as well as suppress wages of American workers by undercutting them. However, this is a government failure, not a private sector/management failure.

if unions are death to a company and its productivity, why does UPS succeed so well? why is that? working with an (almost) 100% unionized driver force? a driver force made up of *teamsters*, that most belligerent of unions? UPS makes money regular like clockwork; introduces new services and technologies on a regular basis; and they get their lazy, good-for-nothing-$30-an-hour-plus-lavish-bennies unionized driver force to deliver packages at a rate of 20 stops per hour. and sometimes, much MUCH more than that. (yes, i used to work for them: both as a driver and later management.)

how’d they do that? is UPS just smarter? do they hire only MIT grads? why can’t all the other unionized industries succeed like that?

easy answer: because they had bad, gutless management. just like the airline industry: all miserable failures, all whining about how hard it is to succeed. except southwest, of course. they seem to prefer to manage properly rather than bitch about their good-for-nothing workforce. (the WSJ recently reported that the co-pilot of the puddle-jumper that crashed into the house in buffalo “due to pilot error” was being paid $16,000 a year. she herself said – on the cockpit tape – that she had no experience with icing. UPS’s highly-paid pilots, OTOH, *don’t* crash their planes and get innocent people killed. coincidence?)

effective management of a unionized workforce means implementing a system of almost constant confrontation with that workforce. letting a mistake go uncorrected, even once, means you’ve set a precedent that will come back to bite you in the butt. it’s *extremely* difficult to do, and quite often unpleasant, but it can be done. profits CAN be made while employees make $30 an hour. all you have to do is manage your ass off.

it’s just that the management of the airline industry; and the steelmakers; and the automakers were too lazy and gutless and incompetent to do the work. MUCH easier to snivel about unions. let’s get it straight: joe lunchbox and his union didn’t run american manufacturing into the ground. joe didn’t kill the golden goose. management did. (who designed and decided to build the edsel? the corvair? the vega? the pinto? and all the other infamous american car bombs? was it the unions? did the *unions* decide to sink $10 billion into the craptacular ‘saturn’ concept?) EVERYthing is ultimately the responsibility of a good manager. and the ruination/decimation of a once-thriving, once-profitable business – and the loss of the thousands of jobs it once supported – lies entirely at the feet of the manager. you know it; i know it; and joe lunchbox knows it. yet every day in every way we hear bad managers and their jock-sniffing groupies (“jack welch: america’s CEO!! 80 straight quarters of ever-improving numbers, just like bernie madoff!”) moan about how they’re not to blame. they only RAN the joint, after all. what possible effect could THEY have, right? it’s those uppity *blue-collar* riffraff that brought down the industry!

(note: none of the above applies to government-worker unions. they’re a whole different animal.)

so no fair complaining when joe gets on a jury and decides to punish those who are most responsible for the current mess. and no fair whining about how ‘large jury awards cost us all’ until corporations and their bought-and-paid-for government start defending the borders and enforcing immigration law. the iron rule of business is that management will reap what *they and they alone* have sown. management planted weeds. joe lunchbox merely worked as directed.

These are all problems, I agree, but it is a reasonable scenario where they didn’t cause the crash. There are plenty of 21 years old that are much better drivers than 50 year old, the blood alcohol limit is a problem but different people have different tolerances and it is not in itself 100% proof that it was driver error, the lack of seat belts come into play only _after_ the accident occurred, and the 90 mph again is not a problem if the car was in good condition and the road straight. Anyway, we seem to jump to conclusions without paying attention to the details of the case.

Jess: please remember that the jury heard for the expert witness that the accident was a direct result of the blown tire. I have experienced _flat_ tires too and they are not much of a problem. But when they do blow up is quite different than if they gradually lose pressure. This is one reason we switched to tubeless tires because they are a lot more _unlikely_ to blow up and cause accidents. Not that they don’t blow up from time to time, but there is a big difference between a blow up and a flat tire.