A Hunger Strike at Obama's GM

Currently there is much speculation on opinion pages and business blogs that General Motors may soon need a second bailout. The present cause of GM's woes is not in Detroit but rather in its European operations. Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of GM is a huge drag on GM. It had been losing money for some ten years prior to the bailout. In November of 2009, the governments of Russia, Germany and the US were engaged in a major international deal that would have resulted in the sale of this turkey but GM's majority stock holder, the Obama administration and its junior partner, the United Automobile Workers resisted. Then interim GM CEO Fritz Henderson made the controversial decision to simply sell the unit off. Readers will remember that Henderson was sacked by the Obama administration and some insiders relate that the cause of his departure was the UAW's ravenous need for an outside source of cash to finance its legacy pension costs that curiously were not addressed in bankruptcy. Like many public sector venture capitalists from Solyndra to A123 Systems GM found it prudent to invest the taxpayer's money where privately generated capital would not go. One suspects that after the election no matter who wins the voters will hear much more about GM's precarious condition. The bailout was sold to the American public as a plan to save American jobs. Now the primary cause of the company's well being is threatened by its international operations and some of those operations are not just unprofitable they are downright sinful.
Generally most Americans don't concern themselves too much about how American companies treat their overseas employees. Generally most American companies operating abroad bring American values with them. While they are there to make a buck American companies do generally impose on themselves some minimal standards of human decency. A notable exception to that rule would be General Motors who in cooperation with the UAW operates Colmotores, a Colombian subsidiary. This has been kept out of the mainstream news feed but it's well known to the AFL-CIO. None other than presidential confidant Richard Trumka who serves on the board Obama never meets with, The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, has gotten into the fight. Trumka says;

"The U.S. and Colombian governments must bring GM Colmotores into dialogue with ASOTRECOL to help facilitate a swift and fair response to the workers’ grievances….Furthermore, the Colombian Ministry of Labor must thoroughly examine General Motors’ occupational health and safety practices and the use of a collective pact in Colombia for compliance with national law and the labor provisions of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement."

ASOTRECOL is not exactly a union but rather an organization of injured and disabled former Colmotores employees. While Obama runs about the country touting the success of the bailout ASOTRECOL members are staging a hunger strike in front of the United States embassy in Bogota. They have sewn their lips shut and vow to starve themselves to death. Worker in Columbia claim a variety of job related injuries. One claims to have been fired after he fell down a flight of stairs while trying to carry a piece of machinery but most of the injuries are of the chronic, compressed disc, carpal tunnel nature. In the meantime Obama allows his super PAC, Priorities USA to run an ad insinuating that Mitt Romney was the cause of a woman's death from cancer while his own company's foreign operations are a moral scandal.