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Sure, do just that, but you'd better have a damn good safety net unless you want Detroit in flames. In spite of my libertarian views, this is why I voted for Ob
by thomasmallen 18y ago
Sure, do just that, but you'd better have a damn good safety net unless you want Detroit in flames. In spite of my libertarian views, this is why I voted for Obama: On the issue of labor. I figured that the economy was already screwed, and we needed somebody who could look out for the middle class that will be left to the wolves.
- hugh 18y agoAuto workers are a pretty weird subspecies of the "middle class" though. As far as I can figure out, they're lower-class people with lower-class jobs who get upper-middle-class money.
- thomasmallen 18y agoWhat makes that a lower-class job? The fact that you're not at a desk? However, you make a good point: I maintain that the prevelant college degree requirement for most desk jobs is responsible for the declining middle class. We're barreling towards a two-class system with a college degree as the price of admission into the upper class.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoWhat makes that a lower-class job? If you can only get a high salary by joining a cartel, you are in a low-class job. If you join the cartel instead of earning what you're worth or finding a different line of work, you are a low-class person.
- thomasmallen 18y agoA union is a cartel now? Are you shitting me? It's amazing how anti-labor people are nowadays.
- thwarted 18y agohttp://www.google.com/search?q=define:cartel http://www.google.com/search?q=define:cartel s/(firm|enterprise|organization)s?/people/g In as much as UAW, for example, couldn't be considered a "firm" or an "enterprise" already. In some sense, UAW is a contracting firm whose service is its members' work product.
- hugh 18y agoThe main difference between the UAW and a regular contracting firm is that if I decide to stop buying labour from a regular contracting firm, that firm can't and won't wind up blockading my factory entrance and trying to stop my new labourers getting in. Whereas if GM tried firing all its union employees and hiring non-union labour instead... well, I'm sure you can guess what would happen. If the UAW were a regular firm, it would be unobjectionable.
- arockwell 18y agoBeing an autoworker is not a skilled job anymore. Anyone can learn to do this.
- thomasmallen 18y agoAnyone can learn to be a computer programmer too. It's called a skill. Unskilled labor requires very little learning, if any.
- dougp 18y agoAsk an intro to CS Teacher about that. Many would disagree.
- ojbyrne 18y agoI visited some auto manufacturing plants back in the 90s and the managers were very careful to point out that being an auto worker required a significant amount of math, computer programming and statistics because of Statistical Process Control, and Robotics, and they would point out that some of their foremen had masters degrees. High wages breed competition.
- omouse 18y agoDetroit has been fucked for a long long time.
- thomasmallen 18y agoIn a way, I named "Detroit" as a symbol of other rust-belt American cities, and more generally, industrial labor in America. US Steel cut pensions, GM cut all salaries by 10% and stopped matching retirement, and this is just the very beginning of a series of moves that corporations will take to protect themselves. I won't comment on the ethics at play here, but I will say that if handled improperly, you will have many angry workers with a lot of time on their hands and little to lose.
- anamax 18y ago> Sure, do just that, but you'd better have a damn good safety net unless you want Detroit in flames. Giving in to extortion is a bad idea. Giving in to dumb extortion ("we'll trash ourselves") is even worse.