Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Road to Nowhere? - 6.30.10

Mass transit has never really gone anywhere in Michigan. Now, there are bills before the legislature that would establish a regional transit authority. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks it is crucial that the lawmakers move now.

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Years ago, when I was writing about South America, economists had a slogan. “Brazil has a great future,” they’d say.

“And it always will have.” By that, they meant that the country would probably never get it together to realize its full potential.

That’s how I’ve always seen mass transit in Michigan. Everybody thinks we need it. Everybody thinks other people should ride it, and nobody wants to spend any money to build it.

The problem, of course, was that this has always been the automobile state. Mass transit was for cleaning ladies. Two years ago, this seemed about to change.

State Representative Marie Donigan of Royal Oak, mass transit’s biggest booster in the legislature, was convinced things were going to move. There was federal money for a demonstration project, light rail between Detroit and Ann Arbor.

There was federal start-up money for light rail along Woodward, along with growing awareness that fossil fuel would run out some day. Well, guess what. Nothing happened.

To make something happen would require money, and political will, and we are very short on both those commodities right now.

Donigan, who has to be gravely disappointed, is now in her last few months in office, thanks to term limits. She won’t be there to see the progress she hoped for. Now, things may even go backward.

In a final attempt to open a door to the future, she has introduced bills to establish a Metropolitan Detroit Regional Transportation Authority. Approval of something like this is essential; failure could jeopardize further federal aid. Plus, the only mass transit the region now has is in jeopardy. The city of Detroit is subsidizing its imperfect bus system to the tune of $80 million a year.

But the cash-strapped city is flirting with insolvency, and won’t be able to do that much longer. Meanwhile, the suburban SMART bus system is also running into problems.

Communities there are cash-strapped too, and some are voting, or threatening to vote, to pull out. What’s been needed for a long time is one regional bus system, so that those without cars, mainly in Detroit, can get to jobs that exist, mainly in the suburbs. To make this happen, a regional authority is needed. Donigan’s bills provide for one.

She would set up a five-member board, with representatives appointed by Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties, Detroit’s mayor and the governor. That makes a lot of sense.

There may be some tweaking necessary; requiring any proposed major projects to be submitted to a vote of the people, say, or requiring unanimous or super-majority consent from the board.

But what is important that we have a balanced system that has the power to make things happen. Getting this done this year would seem almost impossible. The legislature hasn’t resolved either the budget or the Detroit River bridge issues.

The members want to get home to campaign. The House and Senate have difficulty agreeing on anything. Yet if they don’t make this happen this year, it will be a disaster.

The entire leadership will be out of office next year, and the new legislators would have to start over learning the issues from scratch. We elect our representatives to act in the people’s interest and pay them reasonably well to do so.

The time to act on this really is now.

Essay: The Tragedy of Detroit - 6.29.10

It’s been a rough year for Detroit and its troubled school system. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes us for a look behind the headlines.

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This has been a tough and bruising year for the battered city of Detroit and its equally battered school system.

Ironically, this comes at a time when both have their best leadership in years. Mayor Dave Bing has turned out to be an honest, forthright, and competent public servant.

Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit public schools, seems entirely focused on the task of taking a system riddled with incompetence and corruption, and trying to make it work for the benefit of its remaining eighty-five thousand students.

Yet it is not clear how much either can do. Both are haunted by the shadows of the past. It would be hard to make up a plot as bizarre as what happened recently with Detroit’s Public Schools, which were taken over by the state after years of failure by an elected school board. For starters, this really was déjà vu.

The state had taken over the schools a dozen years ago and handed them to an emergency financial manager who did his best to clean up the mess. Eventually Detroit returned to an elected board, and things slipped back into corruption and chaos.

As a result, they once again have an emergency financial manager, now in his second year. This year, school board members took bitter exception to the financial manager’s wish to have oversight over academic matters, not just financial.

They began a legal war. The fallout from that war, however, seems likely to lead to the abolition of the board itself. Last March we learned that Otis Mathis, the president of the school board, can barely read and cannot write a coherent sentence.

He cheerfully admitted this was true. Then, this month, Mathis president resigned after the superintendent complained that he inappropriately touched himself during a meeting with her.

What’s worse, another board member excused his conduct on the grounds that the offender was a young man. Otis Mathis is, in fact, fifty-six. Now, Mayor Dave Bing is finally pushing for mayoral control of the schools. Several months ago, he indicated to me that he wasn’t opposed to the idea, but had his hands full with Detroit’s chaotic finances.

That’s still the case.

But Emergency Financial Manager Bobb probably won’t stay on beyond his current contract, and the schools desperately need one strong person who is directly responsible.

The risk, of course, is that the next mayor may not be as responsible as Bing. This week, the government filed a 19-count federal indictment on tax and fraud charges against the former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who is already sitting in a jail cell.

You may find it easy to roll your eyes at all this, if you are living in Grand Rapids or Birmingham. But the fact is that this reflects on all Michigan. We allowed people to essentially loot Detroit; make vast fortunes, pollute the land, and depart.

Which reminds me that twenty years ago this fall, East and West Germany reunited. The east was poorer than Detroit is now; the west, as well off as we. But they immediately went to work, spending hundreds of billions to get their nation up to speed.

Today, the entire country is prosperous and bustling. There’s a lesson there. It would be nice if Michigan was wise enough to take it.

Essay: Saving Our State - 6.28.10

Many of the Republican candidates running for governor are promising to cut taxes and balance the state’s budget. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wonders how they really plan to do this…

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When I listen to the various candidates for governor, I am reminded of a note Abraham Lincoln wrote to himself in 1864, at a point when the Civil War was going badly and he was waging a desperate struggle for re-election. It said:

"For some days past, it seems that this administration probably will not be re-elected.

Then it will be my duty to cooperate with the president-elect to save the Union. We must do this between election day and inauguration day. For he will have been elected on such grounds that he cannot possibly save the Union afterwards."

What does that have to do with this year’s race for governor?

Simply this. I’m worried that whoever wins - and that’s likely to be a Republican - will have done so by making promises that will ruin our state’s ability to compete for the jobs of the 21st century.

I’m saying that not based on personalities, but on their policies. I’m focusing on the Republicans, because polls for months have shown that all the main GOP contenders would beat either of the two Democrats. Naturally, this could change. But historical trends also indicate that a Republican victory is likely.

So here’s the problem:

Right now the state doesn’t have enough money to perform the functions we are used to, which include funding education and running the prisons; providing foster care and Medicaid and fixing the roads.

That’s why they’ve been having trouble balancing the budget. Now, the GOP candidates all tell us they would cut taxes, balance the budget, lay off workers and yet somehow do more for us.

That sounds really good, until you remember what I learned in second grade, which was that 3 minus 2 doesn’t make five.

Take Attorney General Mike Cox, who is leading in some polls. He would cut the Michigan Business Tax in half. Then he would roll back the income tax increase the legislature enacted in 2007.

All told, he’d cut revenues by about two billion dollars, which is about what it costs to run the prisons every year.

Okay, so how does he pay the bills? I imagine that he isn’t planning on closing the prisons and letting the felons go free.

He talks about saving money by consolidating school bureaucracies and privatizing non-essential services. Good ideas - but they wouldn’t save anything like the two billion he would give up.

There is, of course, “the rising tide lifts all boats” theory, which says that if you cut taxes enough, you’ll get so much new business the state will be swimming in cash, even at a lower tax rate.

But even if that were true, it would take years, and we don’t live in the long run; we live now. Cox’s plan would require massive cuts in important services the state provides. So our schools and roads and bridges would start failing even faster.

New businesses love lower taxes. But they are unlikely to move to a state where the infrastructure is falling apart. Like Lincoln’s political opponent, Cox would have won leadership of the state by pledging decisions that would ruin it.

That doesn’t mean this will happen. Lincoln, by the way, got lucky. Things turned around, he won re-election easily, and the union was saved. Michigan too needs saving, right about now.

Essay: Courting Environmental Disaster - 6.24.10

Kennecott Minerals Incorporated now has nearly all of the permits they need to begin digging a huge sulfide mine in the Upper Peninsula. But, as Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains, some are worried about the environmental impact that such a mine would have…

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Phil Power, the founder of the non-partisan, non-profit Center for Michigan, is anything but a wild-eyed radical. I got to know him well when I was vice-president of his newspaper company.

He is, however, deeply concerned about the environment. He is a man in love with Michigan‘s woods and rivers and trout streams and his cabin in the Upper Peninsula. But now he is deeply worried.

He thinks there’s a strong potential for a huge environmental disaster in Michigan, one that could be as devastating locally as the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

And he is not alone. The focus of his concern is a proposed nickel and copper mine which is about to be dug beneath the Salmon Trout River in the western Upper Peninsula.

Kennecott Minerals Corporation thinks there may be five to ten billion dollars worth of nickel and copper ore there. They are prepared to spend almost half a billion dollars to get it out of the ground. Environmentalists and Native Americans have opposed this from the start. But Michigan is desperate for jobs. And despite their appeals, state officials have given the mine the go-ahead.

Phil Power thinks we’re asking for disaster. True, he told me, the mine would create a few hundred jobs. But he thinks many of them would go to out-of-state workers, and none would last more than a decade or so. He said, “this would bring big-time industrial development to one of Michigan’s most pristine wilderness spots and threaten long-term tourism, fishing and hiking, perhaps forever.“

Some Native Americans say the site is also sacred to them. Kennecott, the company that is preparing to dig the mine, is a subsidiary of the giant Rio Tinto conglomerate, which is based in Great Britain. They claim they will take maximum safety precautions, and say that when they are done, everything will be restored.

Power thinks it’s too risky. He notes the mining operations involve blasting into sulfide rock, which when exposed to air and water produces “acid mine drainage” which includes sulfuric acid and highly toxic dissolved heavy metals, like copper and nickel.

If that happens, it will kill all the fish -- and this river is one of the last known spawning grounds of the delectable Coaster Brook Trout, a native species prized by sportsmen and naturalists.

“Every such sulfide mine ever opened has produced long-term acid mine drainage,” Power says. He doesn’t believe Kennecott has a disaster plan for the environmental damage, any more than BP did.

He also says there were flaws and suspicious behavior in the permit process. An aide to Governor Jennifer Granholm who helped her decide to support the mine later left her team to work for Kennecott. Another got involved with an abortive business deal with the firm.

Nevertheless, the mine looks likely to happen, though Kennecott is still awaiting a permit from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Power has a bad feeling about all this.

“In the Gulf of Mexico oil spill scandal, it has become clear the agency with regulatory oversight of the offshore drilling industry was captured by the very industry it was supposed to regulate.”

He fears the same thing has happened in Michigan, and the proposed sulfide mine is another disaster waiting to happen.

And he desperately hopes he is wrong.

Essay: What Flavor Tea? - 6.23.10

There’s a petition drive underway to put “The Tea Party” on the Michigan ballot. But, Tea Party leaders in the state say they don’t want to be on the ballot. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks he has an idea of what is going on…

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What I am about to tell you may come as a terrible shock, but I’ve decided that you are probably strong enough to take it.

Okay; here goes. Sometimes, dirty tricks get played in politics. These come in all shapes and sizes. At one extreme you have Watergate, which involved political sabotage, bugging, and criminal cover-up that extended all the way to the White House.

That cost Richard Nixon the presidency, as you might recall. On the other hand, some seem more like harmless fun. Democrats, for example, used to have a merry prankster named Dick Tuck, who before Watergate once hired a group of very pregnant women to march around carrying signs that read “Nixon’s the One.”

One of the most common and time-honored tricks has been to try and split your opponent’s vote. For example, if your name is John Smith and you are in a tough primary fight against Jill Jones, you might want to confuse the voters by talking Jan Jones and Jane Jones into putting their names on the ballot, too.

Now, that seems to be happening on a bigger scale with the Tea Party Movement. Wendy Day, who is often identified as a state leader of what claims to be a leaderless, grass-roots movement, says the Tea Party does not want to be on the ballot.

They don’t want to be seen as a separate political party, she and other Tea Party activists say, just as a group that supports candidates who support their agenda.

Coincidentally, this happens, however, to be an almost exclusively Republican agenda.

However, in the last few weeks, petitioners have popped up all over the state trying to get a “Tea Party” on the ballot.

Most of the self-identified Tea Party leaders were shocked and outraged. Yet I saw lots of people in trendy Royal Oak and mostly African-American Southfield signing these petitions.

Chetly Zarko, a conservative blogger, did some digging and found that the canvassers were being paid a dollar per signature by an outfit called Progressive Campaigns Inc., which has done this work for liberal and Democratic Party causes in the past.

They are doing this in the name of The Tea Party, LLC, which was registered with the state in May by a previously unknown blue-collar worker who lives in the thumb and has donated small amounts of money to Democrats in the past.

Zarko calls this a “Democratic Dirty Trick.” The Michigan Democratic Party isn’t taking credit, though it all does seem suspicious. The Secretary of State’s office tells me that if the Tea Party can collect 38,013 valid signatures by July 15, they can get on this year’s ballot, and put candidates up for office.

If that happens, it’s likely that whatever votes they get will come at the expense of the Republicans. So - is this a dirty trick?

Well, that’s up to you to decide. But it doesn’t seem to be illegal. As a state official told me, “voters ought to know what they are signing, but if they are over 18 and voluntarily sign a petition, it’s hard to see how anybody can complain about that.”

They will complain, of course, and maybe even challenge it in court. Well, you never know, but this year just might turn out to be even more interesting than we expected.

Essay: Still Providing Hope - 6.22.10

Focus-Hope, a non-profit social welfare organization in Detroit, has been reinventing itself in the face of the down economy. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks there’s a lesson here for all of us…

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Everyone knows that Detroit was devastated by four days of riots in 1967. What most people have forgotten, however, is that for a long time, the great fear was that it would happen again.

That’s what led, Eleanor Josaitis, a blue-collar suburban housewife with five kids, and Bill Cunningham, an inner-city Roman Catholic priest, to try to do something.

They thought the best thing they could do to help people make it through the next long hot summer was feed them, first of all, so that’s what they did. In March 1968, they scratched out a mission statement: “Recognizing the dignity and beauty of every person, we pledge intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty and injustice.” So they asked for donations; spread the word.

Other cities exploded the next year, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But not Detroit. It wasn’t long before Josaitis and Cunningham decided that feeding people wasn’t enough.

They needed jobs. But the problem wasn’t as simple as that. Thousands lacked any real skills, even basic literacy. So they decided they were in it for the long haul.

Originally, they called their project Focus: Summer Hope. Then it just became Focus: Hope. Eleanor proved to be a master at organizing. Father Cunningham leaned on corporations and the people who run them to help out. Soon, he was successfully cajoling retired executives to come out of retirement and help design and run programs.

They put together a Machinist Training Institute, and gradually expanded to a forty-acre campus in a series of now beautifully restored former industrial buildings on Oakman Boulevard on Detroit’s northwest side. Focus Hope had more than 800 workers by the late 1990s, when a series of tragedies struck.

Father Cunningham died of cancer in May 1997, and barely a month later, the campus was struck by a freak urban tornado. Nobody died, but the buildings were heavily damaged. Eleanor pulled things together; they rebuilt and soldiered on.

Then, the automotive industry began to collapse. Machinist jobs they were training people to fill began to be outsourced overseas.

Hundreds had to be laid off; Focus Hope shrunk to less than half its size. But the organization then largely reinvented itself, again. Last week I spent some time with Josaitis, who at 78 is still on the job every day, and with her Chief Operating Officer, Timothy Duperron, a former Ford executive who failed at retirement.

Focus Hope is in fact doing what Michigan needs to do; reinvent and diversify ourselves. They still train some machinists, but they now have a weatherization program, to train people for the emerging green society of the future.

There’s an Information Technologies Center, now their biggest program, that can lead to a college degree.

But in another sign of the times, Focus Hope spends a lot of time and money simply teaching hundreds of high school graduates how to read, write, and handle simple math skills.

They don’t claim to have all the answers, but they keep plugging away. They are now running a Center for Advanced Technologies, and still feeding 45,605 hungry people every month.

I’m not entirely sure how Focus Hope does all this, but if it were up to me, I’d make sure that anyone concerned with economic development in this state spent a lot of time right here.

Essay: The Leadership Gap - 6.21.10

The race for Governor continues here in the state… but, as Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains, the campaigns have failed to generate excitement…

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Michigan is struggling with major, long-term financial problems at every level these days. The domestic auto industry, the core of our prosperity for a century, has struggled to stay alive.

Even if Ford, General Motors and Chrysler make it, they’ll never again be the mass employers they once were. The days of high wages for largely unskilled labor are gone.

We badly need new business and industry, and need someone to tell us how to grow new jobs or bring them here.

There is nothing secret about our problems. Our unemployment rate has usually been the nation’s worst for years, and while Nevada nosed us out last month, we’ve got nothing to brag about.

Not surprisingly, state government is also in financial trouble, as are the schools.

These problems would be bad in any event.

But they are being made worse by nasty and bitter partisan divisions in Lansing and the legislature.

There’s a widespread failure on the part of all our political leaders to cooperate for the greater good of our state. Now, any one of them will deny that they are part of the problem.

But you’ll also find that their definition of cooperation is for everyone else to see things their way. Now, none of this will come as news to anyone who has been living in Michigan for any length of time. There’s something else on which the majority of Michiganders also agree: We really need new leadership in this state.

And we’re about to get it.

Thanks to term limits, we’ll be electing a new governor this fall. We‘ll be replacing all the other top state officeholders too, and most of the legislature. But we mostly look to our governors to provide leadership. We’ve had a number of past governors who really made a difference: George Romney, architect of our current constitution. The iconic Soapy Williams, with his green bow ties. Bill Milliken, who fought to help our largest city and save our environment. And John Engler, who put his personal stamp on government as no one before.

We need bold creative leadership now, possibly more than ever. So, you might have expected a lot of excitement over this year’s governor’s race, with big personalities and bigger issues.

You might think that - but you’d be wrong. Six weeks before the primary, the race has generated amazingly little interest or enthusiasm, especially among Democrats.

Polls have shown that as many as seventy-six percent of Michigan Democrats don’t know whether they want Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero or Speaker of the House Andy Dillon.

Most would like some other choice. Republicans have a bigger field of five candidates, but the top four are closely bunched, and a huge number of GOP voters are also unenthusiastic and undecided.

Incidentally, none of the candidates is attracting big campaign donations. Possibly that’s because none has offered any exciting proposals to attract new jobs or fix our broken economy.

Possibly we’ve all become cynical about the ability of politicians to fix our problems. Well, you never know.

Whoever does get elected could surprise us. But our current lack of charismatic leadership might not be all bad if it forces us to remember, and act on, this: In the final analysis, reinventing and saving this state is really up to each and every one of us.

Essay: The Criminal Class - 6.18.10

State lawmakers have voted to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would ban some felons from serving in government. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the criminal class…

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The state legislature still hasn’t decided how to balance the budget. I’m not talking about next year’s budget, which they want to get done by the end of the month, so they can go home to campaign.

I’m talking about this year’s budget, which was supposedly balanced last Sept. 30, but turned out not to be balanced after all. There‘s a shortfall of something like $300 million dollars. Governor Jennifer Granholm, who still vows no more cuts to education, wants to plug that with money from the School Aid Fund.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you are guilty of logical thinking. Bad as that idea is, there are worse. Some knuckleheads want to sell money the state has coming in the future for a fraction of its net worth today. They call this “securitization.”

They are talking about the $280 million dollars the state gets every year as part of a settlement with the big tobacco companies.

Every state gets this money, which was supposed to be used for health-related activities, like anti-smoking programs. All but three states, in fact, use some or all of this money for that purpose.

Michigan, of course, doesn’t use a dime. Three years ago, our lawmakers did something even more despicable. They sold off $900 million dollars of tobacco money we were due to get in the future for barely $400 million right then.

That was so they could plug an earlier deficit hole without having to make hard decisions, like cutting spending or raising taxes.

Now, some wanted to do this again.

To his credit, State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop called this “probably the worst thing the state could do.” He called on his colleagues to “take this head on, resolve this budget shortfall directly, and not push it into the next administration.’

Bishop is absolutely right, though it is worth noting that he signed on to selling off the tobacco money three years ago.

He may have learned from that. Or, it could be that he has his own best interests at heart. He hopes to be the GOP’s nominee for attorney general, or, perhaps, lieutenant governor.

Since Bishop wants to still be in government he’d probably prefer to have some money to work with, if only to pay his salary.

But if our legislature can’t balance a budget, it did one thing this week: Outlaw some classes of criminal from holding public office.

Well, actually they didn’t do that either. They just put it on the ballot to ask us to do it. We’ll be asked to ban people convicted of a felony, quote, “involving the breach of the public trust,” from serving in government. There were a few objections from idealistic lawmakers who thought that should be up to the voters, and a few sheepish looks from State Rep. Bert Johnson of Highland Park, who did hard time for armed robbery.

But oddly enough, the most sensible comment came from State Representative Coleman Young the second, who said that if we are going to do this, we should ban anyone who has committed any felonies. Aren’t all felonies breaches of the public trust?

Well, never mind. I have no doubt voters will pass this overwhelmingly, after which Adrian, Albion and everywhere else will be protected from any sudden urges to elect Kwame Kilpatrick.

Essay: Car Culture - 6.17.10

The United Auto Workers Union has a new president, but Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks they need something more: a new marketing strategy.

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America used to be about manufacturing --especially the industrial Midwest. We made stuff here in Michigan, primarily cars and trucks. Well, we still do, although not as many.

Increasingly, we’ve become a service economy, which is a shorthand way of saying we sell words, not stuff, and that life is more about marketing than making things.

Take the United Auto Workers union, for example, in the news this week because of their convention. Here’s what the stories all said: The UAW is struggling to survive, much like the industry it organized. The union has lost more than three-quarters of its peak membership, and is struggling to reinvent itself.

They elected a new president at this convention, which is always a great opportunity to get some buzz. So whom did they choose? Some exciting, dramatic new leader? A dark horse who rose from the ranks and presented the union with a new vision?

Not even close. They took Bob King, the UAW vice president who was next in line, and had been handpicked by the existing leadership. King is a worker who went to law school and became a lawyer, and is highly respected for his bargaining skills.

However, this was anything but a democratic process. My sneaking sympathies went out to a fellow named Gary Walkowicz from a Dearborn truck plant. He had the guts to challenge the establishment. Walkowicz thought the union had given away too much in concessions, which may be dead wrong.

But it is probably how a whole lot of workers feel. The woman who was brave enough to nominate the challenger was booed by the delegates, who then gave Walkowicz a mere three percent of the vote, in what was a totally rigged election.

That’s not to say I wanted Walkowicz to win. But I think not really having to fight for the job isn’t likely to be good for Bob King or the union’s image. The UAW desperately needs some favorable buzz, and for the public to see it as something more than a dying old economy labor union waiting for 1937 to come back.

They need some marketing advice, and here’s some, free of charge. General Motors showed them how last week with a move they claimed was an accidental blunder.

Eight days ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story claiming GM had told employees to stop using the nickname “Chevy.” From now on, an internal memo said, it would be just Chevrolet. They were doing this for “brand consistency.”

This was, obviously, stupid, since the term Chevy is as much a part of the American language as Coke.

Everybody in the nation jumped on the story. The Times even disapproved, tut-tutting in a stuffy editorial, and soon the company was saying, we didn’t do it, we didn’t mean it, we’ll stop doing it, we won’t do it no more, and you can still call your car a Chevy!

Everyone thought GM had screwed up. Actually, I suspect they did it on purpose. For a week, everybody talked about Chevys. Waxed nostalgic about Chevys. It was the biggest free advertising coup that I can remember.

Watch for Chevy sales to soar, temporarily at least.

So, Bob King, new United Auto Workers union president: I hope you were paying attention. Now - it‘s your turn.

Essay: Agony of the UAW - 6.16.10

The UAW is holding its national convention in Detroit this week. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the union, and how much the world has changed.

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Nobody knows what Walter Reuther was thinking that spring night in May, 1970, as he flew up to Black Lake, the United Auto Workers’ recreation center in northern Michigan.

He didn’t seem to spend a lot of time thinking about himself. He was all about his union, and other unions, and helping the poor and disadvantaged get their share of the pie.

But if he had happened to think about his life, he would have had every right to be a little self-satisfied. When the UAW started seventy-five years ago, you could get fired for joining.

Workers had no protection. If they got hurt, they lost their jobs. Paid vacations and health insurance didn’t exist.

Then the union Reuther built changed all that. He’d been beaten up and shot and his brother lost an eye, and some friends had even been killed. But his UAW had led the way in powering millions of Americans into the middle class. Unionized Detroit workers built the weapons that won World War II.

Afterward, they built the automotive dream machines tha made the good life possible. Reuther himself had presided over the building of the recreational complex for UAW workers at Black Lake.

His union was at an all-time high 1.6 million members that May evening, the vast majority employees of the Big Three.

They had arrived, Reuther, of course, never did. His pilot missed the runway; hopefully, he and his wife Mae never knew what happened. Forty years later, he might find it hard to believe what has happened to his beloved union, which is holding its convention in Detroit this week, struggling towards a future.

The UAW has less than a quarter of its peak strength. There are only 355,000 members left. Fewer than a third work for the Big Three. Something like a third of UAW members aren’t in the auto industry at all. Some are health care workers, some college teachers. And that’s where the union sees its future.

Bob King, who is expected to be elected the next president of the UAW today, says his union’s best opportunity for “really high growth” lies in higher education and in organizing casino workers.

Outgoing union president Ron Gettelfinger presided over a time that some must think of as the nightmare years. He had to make concessions that would once have been unimaginable.

The union had to agree to a new, lower wage scale for new hires, not that there have been many of those. The UAW took over responsibility for providing retiree health care out of a trust fund the employers set up that many experts think is undercapitalized.

They made concession after concession; watched Chrysler and General Motors go through bankruptcy and wondered if they‘d have any workers to organize at all. Now, the UAW has to figure out how to survive in a world of independent contractors and global markets.

Shortly before he died two years ago, I asked former UAW head Doug Fraser what Walter Reuther would have done, faced with today’s problems. He said that he didn’t know, that nobody could know. But he knew that Walter would have been fighting as hard and as cleverly as he could for the working man. Today, UAW members have to hope there‘s a little touch of Reuther in Bob King.