Bug

My first car was a 1957 Volkswagen Beetle, which my parents bought me when I was 17 for what seemed like the impossible sum of $750. I don’t know for a certainty, but it may have been among the first VWs in my hometown, where you grew up rooting for either Ford or Chevy as if they were the Red Sox and Yankees. I had first-hand experience with the alien character of my new pride and joy when I was soliciting ads from town merchants for our Enfield High School student paper. When I pulled into the local Chevrolet dealership and asked the manager if he would support the school paper by buying an ad, he looked over my shoulder at my car parked in the lot, then looked at me and said, “Who are you? Oswald?” It was a reference to the freshly deceased most hated man in America, Lee Harvey Oswald…and the implication was immediately clear to me—by driving a VW I was in league with John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Louis Chevrolet did not buy an ad.
Shortly thereafter, I was at a teacher’s house working on our school’s foreign policy magazine (yes, we had such a thing then…seems more preposterous now than Hogwarts). At one point the teacher announced that he had to take his mother shopping. I quickly volunteered to show off my new car. When his mom, an elderly Jewish lady, came out to the driveway and saw my bug, she said, “I won't get in a Nazi car,” and insisted that they take the family Dodge. That’s when I first learned that my cute little bug was one of Adolph Hitler's pet projects.
Being associated with presidential assassins and Nazis was not the least of my problems with my Bug. It also got me arrested…or at least cited…by a couple of cops on the Let's Get the Hippies beat that was a critical part of law enforcement in the Sixties. I had just parked the car in front of my apartment in the student ghetto part of Hartford when they walked out of a donut shop and asked to see my license and registration. After a call into HQ, they wrote me up for having an improperly registered car.
I confess, the provocateur in me may have drawn their attention by spray painting red polka dots on my car, and maybe I should have made sure to report the change to the DMV, but still? (Is it too much a stretch to see this kind of police harassment as a prelude to the Days of Rage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago two years later? I think not.) The righteous anger to scream, “Off the pigs!" that was fashionable at the time stirred within.  But I restrained myself and determined to work within the system by facing my accusers in a court of law. When I showed up in court to defend myself, I was sporting an in-your-face black tie with red polka dots. I pled not guilty. The prosecutor asked on what grounds I thought I was not guilty since he had a copy of the vehicle registration right in front of him and it clearly declared the color of the car as black, not black and red. If you have the registration in front of you, I countered, then you should see that the car is registered in my father’s name, not mine, so you have the wrong man. The court was aghast. "So you want us to go and arrest your father?" he asked. "I wish you wouldn’t," I replied. The judge nolled the case, and "The Hartford One" went free.


I've moved on to bigger and better cars since then. Like my teacher’s mom, I don’t think I would ever get into a Beetle again--not for painful war memories of course--but because they just look so damn uncomfortable. Nonetheless, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about Volkswagen because of what recently went down in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Volkswagen took a most un-corporate like stance by declaring itself neutral on the question of whether workers at its Chattanooga plant should vote to belong to the United Auto Workers Union. Volkswagen’s neutrality was a bit of a kabuki dance (not to mix Axis powers) because Volkswagen actually favored the unionization of the plant as a preliminary step to setting up a workers' council, which is standard in most European companies. Workers Councils, unlike unions, do not negotiate wages and benefits, but they do negotiate working conditions and cooperate with management in planning a company’s future. Volkswagen has found that its workers councils provide it with a distinct competitive advantage, and thus would like to see them in place in all its plants worldwide. But in the US the law says a worker’s council is illegal unless it’s sanctioned by a union, which led to this remarkable occasion of an automaker dropping resistance to the UAW.
Well, there's only so much good sense to go around, and as the vote on whether the Tennessee facility would go union approached, Republican politicians jumped in with their usual toxic mix of hysteria, hypocrisy and dishonesty. They tried to sway the vote by claiming unionization would scare Volkswagen into taking its upcoming order for new SUVs to Mexico. They claimed that if Chattanooga went union, the dominoes would fall across the South and soon there’d be unions at the Mercedes Benz and BMW plants, and Dixie would lose its (ho-ho) charm as a prime location for corporate expansion.Southern politicians (first Dems and now Republicans) have been playing this game and--I must admit--winning it since I was daring to drive that Bug of mine through my little town. Enfield lost the Bigelow Sanford Carpet Mill, its chief employer (aka: job creator), to North Carolina because it was, to use the politically correct term, a right-to-work state. Since being militarily forced off its addiction to free labor after the Civil War, the American South has developed an avaricious appetite for the methadone of cheap labor. It’s easy to maintain because laborers in the South buy into all the scary stories the politicians and the politician’s bosses in the corporate world feed them, as they did in voting down the union in Chattanooga.
As stunning and depressing a defeat as it was, my guess is that it will be short-lived. The Europeans, comfortable with workers councils and trusting that such councils are essential to long-term corporate growth and profitability, will give the South limited opportunity to rise above its miserable existence. If the South refuses to do so, it will see foreign companies pulling up stakes and going to places where the labor’s not only cheaper, but fully engaged as a partner in guiding the company’s future. And the South will fall again.