Shared future?
If Volkswagen truly wants to create a new way forward for relations between labor and management at its plant in Chattanooga as it says it does, it will expand upon a new company labor policy it unveiled Wednesday.
The policy sets guidelines for interactions with labor organizations, the interaction level being relative to the number of plant employees it represents. The more employees the organization represents, the more frequently it can meet at the plant and the closer interaction it can have with VW executives.
For the moment, those rules seemed satisfactory to both the United Auto Workers, which is still desperate to represent employees with a non-dues paying local group after losing an election to represent employees last February, and the American Council of Employees, a local independent labor group.
The two together unofficially represent a majority of VW employees, though exact membership in both is unclear.
What happens after the groups start meeting in relation to official recognition by the company or any future collective bargaining agreement is at the crux of the matter, but for now we have to take the words of Sebastian Patta, VW Chattanooga executive vice president for human resources.
"We recognize and accept that many of our employees are interested in external representation," he said, "and we are putting this policy in place so that a constructive dialogue is possible and available for everyone."
Ideally, the works council that VW would like to have at the plant, which would oversee day-to-day operational issues such as schedules, safety and training, could model the new guidelines with input from truly representational groups.
However, the company would need to remain neutral concerning the groups, and the September letter of intent in which the VW Global Works Council expressed a desire for the plant to be "a UAW-represented facility" and any alleged commitment last spring by VW to UAW to represent its employees -- in spite of February's vote -- would have to be off the table.
If VW truly wants to model a new strategy for employee relations, the possibilities are there. But it means a shared future and not one dominated by a union many plant employees voted that they didn't want and wouldn't be good for the company in the first place.
I said it; that settles it
"Anything I bring to you," Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger lectured Commissioner Joe Graham in the Hamilton County Commission's agenda session Wednesday, "say yes or no. If you don't agree with it, just say no to me."
And who thought the day of stereotypical, heavy handed county bosses was over?
Graham, a watchdog of a commissioner, had questioned a resolution to spend $59,000 to replace 144 chairs in three courtrooms, saying he had independently researched reupholstering the chairs, which would cut the $400-per-chair cost by more than half.
Coppinger told the commissioner "anything that's brought before this commission is vetted" by professionals, so the assumption was the commissioner should keep quiet. In the end, the body's finance committee rejected the proposal.
"As a financial body," Graham asked, "should we not do our due diligence, or our homework?"
They should, of course, and such diligence exhibited over decades -- instead of accepting everything as given and never asking questions -- could save millions of dollars.
Of course, there can't be niggling over every county purchase, but the way taxpayer money is spent is always important.
Climate ho-hum
The left, desperate for good news to shower on President Obama after last week's elections, is hailing the president's recent nonbinding climate agreement with China as groundbreaking. Given a closer look, unless it spurs significant reductions in carbon emissions around the globe, there's not much that breaks new ground.
A 2012 report in the Guardian noted that analysts said a consensus was "that barring any significant changes in policy, China's emissions will rise until around 2030 -- when the country's urbanization peaks, and its population growth slows." That year, 2030, happens to be the year the vaunted agreement suggests China stop growing its carbon emissions.
As for the United States, we are to not stop growing but cut our carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, based on a 2005 baseline. Fortunately, the country already is on track to cut its emissions by 17 percent by 2020. The additional cut, according to Jillian Kay Melchoir, a Thomas L. Rhodes fellow for the Franklin Center, will cost a U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimate of $51 billion and 224,000 jobs, and would cut global temperatures by "less than two-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit.