As Washington flirts with bailing out the auto industry, Ivan Osorio wonders what we’re saving, and ponders\u00a0the downside of socializing the market<\/a>:<\/p>\n As The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s Paul Ingrassia notes, Detroit doesn\u2019t need more money, but radical change<\/font><\/a>, including getting rid of union contracts, which, as he noted on NPR this week<\/font><\/a>, include burdensome work rules. Here\u2019s one example he cites in his Journal <\/em>op ed:<\/p>\n A few years ago the UAW even waged a spirited fight to protect the \u201cright\u201d of workers to smoke on the assembly line, something that simply isn\u2019t allowed at, say, Honda\u2019s U.S. factories. Aside from the obvious health risk, what about cigarette ashes falling onto those fine leather seats being bolted into the cars? Why was this even an issue?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In what other industry would this even be tolerated?<\/p>\n Yet even that is not all \u2014 then there is the UAW \u201cJobs Bank,\u201d which keeps allegedly laid-off auto workers on at full salary and not working<\/font><\/em><\/a>. This is beyond Soviet. In the former Communist bloc, people had a saying: \u201cWe pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.\u201d Not even pretending to work and getting paid for real beats that every time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He invokes the Russian “Lada<\/a>” marque – not that you have to go back to the USSR to see the historic failure<\/a> of socialism in the auto industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Washington flirts with bailing out the auto industry, Ivan Osorio wonders what we’re saving, and ponders\u00a0the downside of socializing the market: As The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Paul Ingrassia notes, Detroit doesn\u2019t need more money, but radical change, including getting rid of union contracts, which, as he noted on NPR this week, include burdensome work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}