If you are following the General Motors saga, Fortune magazine has an excellent overview.
An excerpt:
The union's leverage over GM affects everything that the company tries to do in cost cutting. The burning example is retiree health benefits, surely a competitive cost disadvantage if there ever was one. At various Berkshire Hathaway meetings, chairman Warren Buffett has envisioned what GM would do if it had contracted many years ago to buy steel at a premium price and had arrived at 2005 needing to get that cost back in line. "It would simply get out of the contract," Buffett has said. GM's retiree health benefits, arrayed against the benefits that the Japanese companies don't provide, are like paying extra for steel. But the odds against GM's breaking this contract are monumental.
Read it all here.
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