I haven't wanted to blog much about the (in the words of Marketplace) Ongoing Financial Crisis. What is there to say beyond the obvious? Everybody's scared. Scared of layoffs, scared of the value of their retirement and college savings accounts (if they even have them), scared that the home loan they took out at the peak of the market was utter folly. I can't really come up with anything original to say about all of it.
But what I can't keep silent about anymore (and what I'm not hearing from the media) is the unbelievable classism and anti-worker attitudes on display in Washington D.C. at the moment. What the Detroit automakers have had to go through to vie for a paltry portion of the megabucks we've shelled out to "save" the financial sector is nothing short of ridiculous. Of course it was stupid for them to go to Washington the first time without a firm plan and on corporate jets, but do you really think the execs from CitiGroup are flying in coach to fill their pockets? Did the AIG CEO have to agree to work for $1? To my knowledge, no.
Let's be clear on this: I absolutely believe that the auto industry should have to show a viable plan, cut executive compensation, and generally come clean on the greed that caused this whole mess. But so should every other company involved in this debacle. Just because the financial services sector is peopled by white-collar workers who can be laid off at a moment's notice just to bump up share prices does not mean that those workers--or those industries--are any more worthy of saving. At least at the end of the day the autoworker can go home and say he made a car. What the hell did the CEO of Goldman Sachs make?
Besides the obvious clusterfucktastrophe, of course.
The media coverage of the auto industry--even on outlets I normally consider excellent, such as NPR--has been condescending and one-sided. Today's Morning Edition report quoted Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as an opponent of the bailout without once mentioning that he represents a state infamous for its union-hostile auto industry. Gosh, he couldn't possibly have a dog in this fight, could he?
I come from a long line of union folk, and while many out there would like to convince us that unions (be they of automakers or teachers) are the root of problems ranging from the decline of the auto industry to the much-trumpeted but not much-evidenced crisis in education, I'm not buying it. Unions provide a necessary counterweight to a corporate world that is driven only by profits. Enlightened companies and corporations recognize that happy, healthy employees are productive employees, but not all companies are enlightened. By any stretch of the imagination.
We've already lost a lot of ground as workers, and that has translated into a middle class that is barely holding on. Further marginalize the unions and that's only going to get worse. It's time we start holding those who--in the words of one commentator I heard yesterday--shower before work to the same standards that we're demanding of the people who shower after.
Edited to add: Blythe in comments provided a link to two blog posts by Jim at Sweet Juniper, who lives in Detroit. Both are excellent. The first is makes many of the same points I was trying to make with this entry, albeit in a much more personal way:
Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit's automakers are very the same people who had no problem with the $700 billion bailout of the very "industries" responsible for the sudden evaporation of so many billions of dollars in equity and credit. I would like to show them the state of this city and ask them to think about how much worse it (and hundreds of other cities reliant on the auto industry) will get if any of these three employers were suddenly unable to pay their employees or suppliers. This isn't Manhattan. We're not talking about Goldman Sachs associates suddenly not being able to pay the mortgages on their $350,000 parking spaces in Tribeca for the Ferraris they bought with their 2006 bonuses. We are talking about the lifeblood of a region that has already suffered so deeply, and I can't believe how many people are speaking so flippantly about allowing this great American industry to die.
The second references correspondence he received after his post and is very revealing about the hidden and not-so-hidden classism in our society:
...What has surprised me is how all kinds of people---conservatives and liberals---have such a visceral, angry response to the idea of the lazy union worker. In the comments I said it reminded me of the way people were so up in arms about Reagan's "welfare queen" mythology in the 1980s (you know: the black welfare mom driving all those kids around in a Cadillac and buying caviar with her food stamps). Now we have the lazy, do-nothing UAW member sitting in a room doing cross word puzzles instead of working on the line, collecting $70 an hour salaries with better health and retirement benefits than the CEOs of the company. I have no doubt that in the 1980s there were a few women on the welfare rolls driving around in Cadillacs. And I have no doubt that it wouldn't be a huge challenge to find a lazy UAW member getting paid more than he's worth. But does anyone really believe that all union members are that way---that this industry is currently crippled because lazy people without college degrees had the audacity to believe they deserved to join the middle class?
Good stuff. Go read it. (Thanks, Blythe!)
