Jason stanley, "comrades or competitors?"

(12): challenges to solidarity in global market, for three reasons

1. inequality is greater in global market
2. cross-border immobility--capital mobility increases price elasticity for labor, from perspective of capital [but would they not still be competing, for jobs, even if there were mobility?]
3. an appreciating currency increases the price of labor; workers have no control over appreciation/depreciation, yet it will provoke cross-border hostility

(23-24): in the aftermath of the Auto Pact--because of appreciation in the US dollar beginning in the mid-70's, real wage costs were lower in Canada till the mid-80's. this made the crisis of the late 70's less severe, and the recovery of the early 80's stronger. [in this narrative, currency appreciation is at the forefront -- but not clear how labor immobility is working to undermine solidarity? isn't it more like divergent skill?]

(30-31): since cabotage routes were not part of the liberalization agreement and since freight was a small part of the IBT for american workers, there was muted response, on their part. canadians were more up-in-arms after liberalization of their half in the late 80's--in '86, a nationalist proposal was defeated; but in '89, it passed. importance of political economy ftw!

The United Auto Workers' (UAW) embrace of the Obama administration's proposal to restructure General Motors and Chrysler has led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, the elimination of union work rules built up over decades, big cuts in benefits and a six-year ban on strikes. At Ford, workers recently voted to reject those concessions. But the UAW, once the pacesetter for a steadily rising standard of living for U.S. workers in the decades following the Second World War, is still collaborating with employers in a race to the bottom.

Trains were shifted from electric to diesel engines. Sometimes, they were simply done away with and replaced by buses and then cars. Together with Big Oil, Big Auto converted electric transit systems to fuel-based bus systems. In one estimate: In 1935, electric train engines outnumbered diesel train engines 7 to 1. "By 1970, diesel train engines outnumbered electric ones 100 to 1. And GM made 60 per cent of the diesel locomotives." The electric rail system in and around Los Angeles was almost erased.
(...) By 2001, that goal was achieved, beyond belief. Some 90 per cent of Americans drove to work by that year. The findings of the 2001 National Household Travel Survey are striking. Only 8 per cent households reported not having a vehicle available for regular use. The survey showed that "that daily travel in the United States totalled about 4 trillion miles, an average of 14,500 miles per person." Trips by transit and by school bus each made up just 2 per cent of daily trips taken in 2001.
(...) An average American family in 2004 spent up to a fifth of its income on transportation. That's against 13 per cent on food. In "automobile dependent neighbourhoods," according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, that could go up to 25 per cent. In bigger cities, the traffic only gets worse, never better. There were over 135 million passenger cars in 2006. Overall, registered vehicles clocked in at more than 250 million. Imagine the centrality of oil, autos and private vehicles to just about everything. This is the very model our own Indian elite seek to transplant. Private automobiles at the cost of public transport. Never mind the latter is a lot cleaner and creates large numbers of jobs. And so we add thousands of such vehicles to the roads each week.
(...) Each car that GM puts out carries a health care cost of around $1600. For Chrysler, that's $1500. But for Toyota, that cost is under $300 per car. Japan has a far superior public health system. In the corporate-media of the United States, this does not lead to calls for a good health system. Or for making health access cheaper. It leads to calls for doing away with the union contracts that guaranteed auto workers health benefits for life. For retirees, the pullback has already begun.

The auto workers and their union did not cause the crisis of the auto industry -- after all, they had no control over the corporations' policies. True, the union in its heyday fought for and won higher wages and benefits, gains which between the 1940s and the 1970s spread throughout the economy to other unions and workers, raising living standards for us all. But workers and the UAW did not "price themselves out of the market" or "kill the goose that laid the golden egg" -- no, they challenged employers for a greater share of the profits and won. We all owe auto workers of that era for the living standards that workers achieved in this country. What the union failed to do, however, was develop a broader vision of workers' power. When confronted with other corporations competing in the market by using more modern plants and lower wages, the union had no plan. The UAW, like other unions, failed to build a genuine international labor movement to raise auto workers' wages in other countries. Nor did the union build a political movement in the United States to challenge the power of capital and to restrain competition. Nor did the UAW join with other unions to organize the great majority of unorganized U.S. workers.