Are the Golf Carts Made with Union Labor?

Throughout the Detroit automakers’ bailout saga, the United Auto Workers’ leadership has claimed that the union has made enough major concessions to date, and that demands for it to make more, from company and government officials, are attempts “to make workers shoulder the lion’s share of the costs of any restructuring plan.”

If the UAW leadership is so concerned about the union’s rank-and-file bearing the costs of the Detroit automakers’ restructuring, there’s one item on which it could easily save millions for its members. Reports Foxnews.com:

Even as the industry struggles with massive losses, the UAW brass continue to own and operate a $33 million lakeside retreat in Michigan, complete with a $6.4 million designer golf course. And it’s costing them millions each year.

The UAW, known more for its strikes than its slices, hosts seminars and junkets at the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich., which is nestled on “1,000 heavily forested acres” on Michigan’s Black Lake, according to its Web site.

But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.

Necessities, shmecessities….