Paying them full pay is stupid and a hallmark of how union contracts go wrong.
Now.. I understand that the workers may have a skill set that could be needed next week when the plant needs to make batteries again... So I would think a furlough from work, with some pay, that is better than unemployment, maintains benefits, and time in the company would be ok... but full pay? Ridiculous.
From the OP's quoted section:
Now a new report says in one Michigan plant, built with $151 million in federal money to assemble battery packs for the Chevrolet Volt, workers have been paid for months to do nothing. According to WOOD-TV of Grand Rapids, Mich., the 300 workers at the LG Chem plant in nearby Holland have yet to ship a single battery pack since the plant opened late last year. While employees have built battery cells for testing, those were shipped back to LG Chem's home labs in South Korea months ago, leaving workers to do odd jobs around the factory, volunteer for community projects or just sit and play Monopoly. Several say training also stopped months ago, leading some employees to quit in frustration.
Not when the plant needs to make batteries
again, the plant has never produced batteries except for small quantities of test batteries. GM got the federal government to pay for a factory to build the batteries in the USA, but instead of building the batteries in the USA, GM is buying the batteries from the cheapest source whilst getting taxpayers to pay salaries for three hundred union workers with nothing to do.
Not only did Congress (and admittedly, Obama too) fund a factory with nothing to build, but Congress is also responsible for the tax laws that make it impractical to build batteries here. I could add that Obama heads the regulatory burden that goes along with this except I'm generally in favor of these regulations; battery manufacturing can be extremely dirty if not regulated tightly.
This is Obama's baby, but it's a bipartisan problem. One cannot simply throw a few hundred million to build a battery plant while leaving in place the tax and regulatory structure that prevents such a factory from being workable at good union wages. I suppose a non-union plant paying low wages might be feasible or nearly so, but if we're to chase the bottom there's hardly any reason to try to keep manufacturing. Either way, we need to pick a lane; funding a plant with tax dollars when the plant cannot be feasible is just stupid.