Don’t say that word! You know … “that famous term that everybody’s using,” as the United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger put it yesterday. He wouldn’t bring himself to actually utter the word “bailout,” which the people at Webster’s dictionary recently noted was the most looked up word of 2008.

Gettelfinger and his industry prefer a different B word – “bridge loan.” You’ll hear more from Gettelfinger and the Big 3 CEOs today, when they get a re-do on their plea to Congress for up to 34 billion dollars in government aid – which is 7 billion more than they were asking when they went to Washington 2 weeks ago. Time is money.

Who is Ron Gettelfinger? He started as an assembly line worker in 1964 at a Ford factory in Kentucky. He worked on the chassis repair line before rising up the UAW ladder.

An old NY Times profile describes him as a religious man who doesn’t smoke, drink or gamble. He’s a former Marine who grew up on a family farm in Indiana – one of 12 children.

One of 12 children - the guy GREW UP on an assembly line!

Gettelfinger has negotiated some tough deals with management. But he’s also responsible for convincing workers to make some major concessions, or givebacks as they’re called. And now he’s convinced the union to offer up more concessions to help keep the Big 3 afloat – like halting the policy of paying laid off workers 95 percent of their salary.

Then there are the CEO’s.

Chrysler’s CEO, Robert Nardelli, landed at the auto company on one of the biggest golden parachutes ever made. He had been forced out of his previous job as head of Home Depot with a 210 million dollar goodbye package. Chrysler’s a private company so it’s tough for the public to get a fix on how long it can survive without aid.

As for Ford, it’s believed to have a bit more staying power than the others because it has enough cash on hand to get it through another year. Its CEO, Alan Mulally, has a master’s degree in astronautical engineering. He IS a rocket scientist. And he got a stratospheric signing bonus when he joined the company in 2006 – but poor results forced his compensation down in 2007 by more than 40 percent – to under 23 million dollars.

An equally interesting character at Ford, operating behind the scenes, is Mulally’s predecessor, William C. Ford Jr., the great grandson of founder Henry Ford, He has a reputation as a conservationist who’s determined to see the industry move to battery powered electric cars, provided we don’t depend on Asia for our batteries, as we do now, but make them in the USA. The extended Ford family still controls the company. During the past year, the value of William C. Ford Jr.’s personal company stock holdings sunk from 39 million dollars to 7 million. At this rate, he’ll NEED better mileage.

General Motors CEO, Rick Wagoner, who stands 6’4”, was on the Duke University basketball team and was said to have dreamed of becoming a pro. He wound up with a Harvard MBA. But he didn’t name his dog Harvard. He named him Duke. Wagoner’s been with the company for 31 years. Of the Big 3, G.M. is considered to be in the biggest danger of collapsing without a big infusion of government money. The Duke man and the chassis man need each other now. They’re on the same team.