I just bought a new KIA. Does that make me UN-american?

[politicat]

48. My grandfather was a UAW shop steward. In the 90s, he told me to stop buying Big 3.

When GM opened the joint venture NUMMI plant, they brought in Japanese manufacturing methods and produced a better car. My grandfather was the master electrician for a Midwestern plant, and spent 6 months at NUMMI learning the method to bring back. The manufacturing method is strongly focused on quality and employee empowerment to produce a stellar product. He started skeptical, but came around to the idea and became a strong supporter. His goal in his professional life was to produce safe cars that exceeded expectations.

Grandpa and the rest came back to start the implementation and retool, and the UAW in the Midwest rebelled. They were insulted by the implication that their quality was poor (it was) and that they needed to change (they did.) Morale dropped because these big babies couldn't admit they had things to learn, and their quality of work dropped further. My grandfather retired soon after, completely disgusted.

When I started car shopping, my grandfather was very firm in his opinions that I not buy anything produced in the Midwest plants. He could not trust a culture that would not admit their own capacity for error, and would not let me put my body in their products. But he also insisted I always buy a union-made vehicle, because solidarity with working people knows no boundaries. Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi in Asia and Benz, Volkswagen, BMW-Mini are all pro-union. The lack of union representation at the plants in the US is the result of the states and the UAW, not the parent corporations resisting. (IIRC, there was recently a Kentucky plant that Volks wanted in the union, and the workers themselves refused.)

So no. The UAW, or at least its membership, has been cutting their own throats for at least 35 years. They seem to like the pain.