Disconnect

[veronica_rich]

I have calmed down somewhat from a couple of nights ago - but not by a lot. And definitely not toward those trying to sinkhole the Big 3 automakers. Besides the obvious need to preserve the fully 1 percent of the American population that would be directly affected by such job losses, I still contend the Republican senators who voted against this bailout are chewing their own feet off to spite their posture - the UAW might support the Democratic Party, but I guarantee you the majority of individual laborers who vote have voted Republican their entire lives, by and large. Management is not the hoi polloi.

However, if those people have any sense, they are reconsidering their support for the GOP in future elections and will instead check out individual candidates before casting a ballot.

This isn't so much about the UAW being asked to make concessions. The UAW would make some concessions; the UAW has made some concessions (just ask GM, at least) in the past. More than once. But why are we not hearing about upper management being asked to make concessions, too? No hired hand needs to make $25 million a year, especially if the company they're running is sucking hard into the ground. I agree with the UAW president, who said it sounds like these GOP senators are not simply trying to get a deal this time - they're trying for a union busting. While there is plenty in history to support the idea that unions can be corrupted, there's even more evidence that government can be corrupted - or, more accurately, that individual officials are corrupt. Do we abolish Congress? Burn down the White House? Bulldoze the Illinois Capitol?

Unions are necessary. Even if you've never been in a union, you probably enjoy benefits obtained by unions at some point in history: minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, health insurance subsidized by your employer, vacation and sick pay, retirement, bonuses. (And if you enjoy none of these in America, well ... I don't think it's a coincidence that unions have been on the decline, by and large, for several years, and working conditions keep getting shittier - do you?) Perhaps unions need to be revamped or restructured for a new century - but not abolished.

In short: Quit being asshats. Especially those of you from states that depend on the Big 3. Yeah, YOU. I think something happens to a person's logic once they get inside the Beltway, I swear to Dog. I would hope our incoming team for 2009 would be immune from that, but I know not all of them will be.

Comments

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

You and I have jobs that depend on some mental talent, some personality, some thinking and learning in order to do them well. For all the crap we put up with most of the time, comes also a measure of respect from the public at large. Teachers are generally well-regarded as engaged in a noble profession that not everybody wants to do; ditto with journalists, by and large. In other words, people generally believe you have to have a brain and an education to do what we do.

To work on the line at an auto factory, you don't need to be very smart or very leaderly, or particularly "with it" except enough not to get yourself sucked into or smashed by some machine. I grew up in an auto worker family, so I know this firsthand; my father is not a stupid man, but the mental agility he has for numbers and figuring things out was never needed for that job (and he has complained often, in fact, that the job made him dumber over 30 years). He took it in the early 1970s as a young man because it was high-paying, he didn't need a special education for it, and he wanted a lifestyle where he didn't have to bring his work home with him. (In later years he would regret this "career" choice greatly, going so far as to try to forbid me to work at a factory one summer while I was in college, even though I would have made more money there than at the crappy fast-food job I eventually found. He explained that factories in the area were too great a lure with high wages and he was afraid I might have given up school to stay there instead. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago, and things are not what they were then. In short, I'm glad I don't have a factory job, for many reasons.)

The most basic reason people unionize is not for pay, but to gain respect from their employer - and for a job, respect takes the form of pay, benefits, being taken seriously and being seen as necessary to a company's operation. Unions do not happen where workers are treated with respect and paid a decent (not high - decent, as in able to do more than survive) wage and given basic benefits to take care of their families when they get sick.

On a tangental note: As long as we have policies and attitudes in place that encourage constant breeding and/or discourage birth control in any way, we're going to have an ever-increasing population. Our world may be getting more technological, but that just means computers can replace people. In short - if you're going to have all these people, they need jobs. And some of those jobs involve mindlessly putting Cog A into Slot B: factory workers, sanitation workers, janitors, you name it. We need these people even if we personally (you and I) don't want to do these jobs - but these people also have dignity and want to be recognized for doing their jobs well. About the only kind of "respect" they will get, frankly, is in the form of good pay and benefits. And there will always be a need for unions to lobby for this, since human nature - being what it is - means that a lot of employers will always be greedy and not want to pay what these people what they deserve.

Finally particular to the car industry, it's worth noting that the percentage of a new car's cost that goes for actual unionized labor (remember, this doesn't include the engineers and other white-collar employees who contribute to the company) is very, very small - single digits. So to me, the only possible reason for picking on organized labor to make concessions for this bailout is to bust the unions - not as an actual cost-saving measure designed to genuinely save an industry.