Megan McArdle says GM management "cried wolf" once too often:
"One of the most remarkable things I learned in writing about GM was that Ron Gettlefinger was totally blindsided by GM's financial collapse. The UAW had so often convinced itself that the company's dire warnings were simply strategic bargaining claims that it didn't understand how parlous the underlying finances were--and in fairness, in the past, management had often made exaggerated claims when it was bargaining. One former auto analyst I talked to said that the company would routinely claim that anything it didn't want to do was being blocked by the union--but when the rare equity researcher actually talked to the UAW, they'd often find that the union had never heard of the issue where it was allegedly the sole obstacle to change."
Apparently neither labor or management took to heart the famous parable about the Boy Who Cried "Wolf!"
Middle-class no more:
No jobs, no prospects, no future. The life of the unemployed.
