. . . may no longer be good for the GM worker. Or that much benefit to the country.
The good news is that GM and Chrysler are hiring again in Michigan. The bad news is that line jobs, according to a guest on today's Diane Rehm Show, pay $14 per hour, or about $32,000 per year --and little or no overtime available. Hence employment that produced a good wage for high school graduates a generation ago have gone away. Thirty-two thousand dollars a year. Not good.
As a benchmark sign for the economy, this is sobering. Well-paying jobs are fast disappearing in the US, moving overseas where they are transformed into low-paying jobs for foreign workers. The trickle-down effect is pushing average wages down throughout the economy, except for Wall Street and executives in large public corporations, whose number is quite low relative to overall employment numbers.
The problem is not that there are people willing to take lower-paying jobs. The problem is that there are people that HAVE to take lower-paying jobs. There are no others.
Contrast the dropping average wage to, say, (1) the obscenely-high wages on Wall Street, (2) the increasing profits of major corporations, and (3) the effect of the Bush tax cuts on the very wealthy (the expiration of which Republicans are fighting very, very hard). The acceleration of the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle economic strata to the very wealthy continues unabated. And why? Because of raw political power.
The US is far down the path to becoming a plutocracy composed of the relatively few very wealthy and the vast numbers of people barely making it paycheck to paycheck.
We need a fundamental change of thinking, one that insists on a concepts of fairness and balance in the workplace, one that is offended by salaries in the scores and hundreds of millions of dollars. We need unions able to fight for higher wages and politicians more resistant to corporate influence. We need government-provided employment ("stimulus") that pays a high wage.
In the face of dramatic climate changes and a baffling commitment to a war in Afghanistan for which winning cannot even be defined, among other issues, where does wage equalization rank? Not high. But it remains a huge problem for the future.
The bail-out of GM and Chrysler were good things with a good payoff. But let us not fool ourselves. The benefit to the country and its future is not as good as it should be. More should have been done to protect workers and their right to decent income. The bail-out of the finance industry? I'm trying hard to see the benefit, especially when so little accountability was required of the banks and AIG.
We need some changes fast.