The election is over so it is now safe for the GOP to cater to their Wall St friends and tell blue collar workers to stick it. I can't be the only one disgusted that, after giving a blank check to the people who got us into our financial mess, the GOP wants to stick it to one of the nations's last remaining manufacturing sectors so they can use the opportunity union bust and to further push the working man (or woman) further down the economic food chain.The irony is that Wall Street's insistence on quarterly profits, many times at the cost of long term investment, helped push the automakers into this dilemma.
I'm not saying the UAW shouldn't have to negotiate and accept lower pay and benefits, it's a global economy and domestic workers need t deal with the fact that their competition comes from other countries and lower wages. I'm also not saying that the Big 3 domesticautomakers shouldn't pay a price for making cars people want as opposed to making people want the cars they will build before customers know they want it (would have been handy to have a few more fuelefficient cars around when fuel prices rose -- something that has been foreseeable for years). There has been no inclination of management in the auto industry to produce vehicles that get even better fuel economy without the government mandating that they do so, because that would affect Wall Street's profits.
Still with all that, it's the hypocrisy from the GOP, supposed friend of the average guy, that gets me. Aside from fiscal conservatives, who seem to be running from the party, their base is the blue collar worker. Granted, many of them are in the south, where unions were never as popular as in the north, but if I'm a blue collar worker down there I'm wondering if the GOP is going to stab me in the back as soon as my interests and theirs go different ways. They are purposely destroying the middle class in the United States. This isn't some accident, or blunder... it's by design.
Like them or hate them, we all benefit from the presence of labor unions -- unless you're one of the ones working 6 days a week, 14 hours a day, for minimum wage and no benefits in an environmentally hazardous factory where children are running around assisting you. The labor unions rose to counter act excesses by management in a capitalist system. Labor organizations exist to look out for the interests of the workers, while management looks out for the interests of the owners--and somewhere in the middle the two meet, and figure out what is acceptable. In an ideal world, there would be no need for labor to organize. If management andpoliticians oppose the concept of labor organizations, then giving labor no reason to exist, such as paying workers a fair wage with adequate benefits, would be in order. Again, this is hard to do when other societies, whom we compete with, refuse to do the same.
If the government really wanted to help the Big 3, they would take their healthcare costs off of the carmakers' plates and offer universal healthcare. I'd have more respect if the GOP came out and said we're doomed if we keep handing out money like it was candy. We can't keep paying for bailouts, the war on terror, social security, medical care etc without eventually devaluing our currency and/or defaulting on the national debt -- something is going to give. But they didn't. Instead, the GOP continues to exploit every anti labor opportunity, even though their policies to weaken labor have also eroded the middle class and weakened the economy.
In a nutshell: If it's the GOP's rich, banker friends in trouble, they get a blank check. If it's Joe 6-pack, they get an unemployment check. Folks at the top get richer, snatching up corporate assets at bargain prices, while the average worker foots the bill.The economic disaster that the GOP has been engineering won't affect the super rich, and it won't affect the super poor; it is simply designed to bleed out all of the wealth in between. It is bad enough when it is done to us by our competitors, it is horrible when we do it to ourselves.
