WORLD> America
Automakers plead with US Congress; votes lacking
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-04 09:03

WASHINGTON -- Imperiled automakers and their union worked feverishly Wednesday to sell a skeptical Congress on a $34 billion aid plan, promising labor concessions and restructuring, but the Senate's Democratic leader said there still weren't enough votes to tap the $700 billion federal bailout fund to prop up the foundering Big Three.

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, steps from a Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid car Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008, at his hotel in Washington after driving from Detroit to testify at Congressional hearings on the auto industry bailout. If the Detroit Three automakers have learned anything since their last trip to Washington, it's that the old way of doing business just won't fly. So the decision by auto executives to travel in hybrid cars rather than corporate jets is just the start to overhauling their image as the industry pleads its case for $25 billion in federal loans. [Agencies]

One day after the auto companies sent survival plans to Capitol Hill in an urgent plea for bailout billions from the fund, Sen. Harry Reid told The Associated Press in an interview, "I just don't think we have the votes to do that now."

In Capitol Hill meetings, industry officials said the collapse of one or more of the Big Three carmakers could greatly worsen the nation's recession and undermine the companies' ability to survive.

"We're on the brink with the US auto manufacturing industry. We're down to months left," Chrysler's vice chairman, Jim Press, told The AP in a separate interview. "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression."

The United Auto Workers union, scrambling to preserve jobs and benefits, agreed at an emergency meeting in Detroit to allow the companies to delay payments to a multibillion-dollar, union-run health care trust and to scale back a jobs bank in which laid-off workers are paid most of their wages. The concessions could help mollify some lawmakers who have criticized the union's benefits as too rich when compared with those of workers at foreign-brand auto plants in the US.

The Bush administration and auto-state Republicans and Democrats are pushing to help the automakers with aid from a different source: a previously approved $25 billion program that's supposed to be used to help them produce more environmentally advanced vehicles.