Caterpillar Labor Problems and Burdens of Success
Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) faces a relatively small strike at its Joliet, Ill., plant. The members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers will walk out when their six-year contract expires. The strike shows the extent to which successful manufacturers can…
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Boeing machinists walked off the job in 2008. Boeing’s C-17 plant in Los Angeles was shut in the summer of 2010 because workers were upset with the company’s benefits offer. There was more trouble with unions, which have members who work at Boeing, late last year. Machinists pressured Boeing then about the construction of a plant in South Carolina. The battle was great enough to involve the National Labor Relations Board. The UAW would never have had similar leverage at the Big Three over the past four years. And the future power of that union has been undermined at the car companies, with the agreement of the unions oddly enough, in exchange for a part of the financial turnaround of Detroit.
UAW workers at GM used to get among the best benefits given by any U.S. company. Hourly wages were high enough that, combined with these benefits, GM lost its margin advantage over Japanese rivals. The years and years of extraordinary compensation are over. New blue-collar workers at GM get a fraction of what their predecessors did. But GM paid 47,500 blue-collar workers $7,000 each earlier this year because of the car company’s large profits.
Caterpillar workers can strike. They have pay and benefits to maintain. Caterpillar’s success allowed them to keep much of what they are fighting for now. GM workers could not do the same. All each of them gets is $7,000.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
