Working class seppuku
It’s been a hard week to have any hope for the future of this society. Yesterday, I listened to a story on the “liberally biased” NPR about the GM plant closure in Georgia. The whole tone of the piece was that union wages, benefits, and retirement packages were killing GM. Not a word about a the per car costs of executive wages, executive perks, executive retirement packages, executive healthcare, etc., etc. It’s the union’s fault for expecting that their members might get a middle class lifestyle after devoting a lifetime to making the executives and major shareholders of GM rich. That’s apparently an outdated mode of thinking. The real killer in the piece was the repeated quotes from one worker in the plant stating that he and his co-workers were overpaid for what they do. Teasers for tomorrow’s (today’s) installment of the story refer to a “thriving” Toyota plant in Kentucky that has “resisted” unions. ‘Cause, you know, UnionThugs come in, wage war on the poor workers, and then force the bastards to take higher wages and benefits with the sole intent of bankrupting corporations. Bravo, NPR!
Stomach punch number two has been in watching the ways in which New Yorkers have been reacting to the impending (now realized) transit strike. Most of the personal blogs I’ve been watching (over a dozen) are primarily worried about how the strike will effect them. Okay, I get that. That’s a natural first reaction. I’m sure I’d be worried about that, mostly in the context of “are my employers going to be dicks about this?” if I were in their situation. But the vitriol with which some of them have addressed the possibility of a strike is truly stunning to me. Even in the blogs where the reaction has been mild, I’ve seen no concern for the very real issues that these workers are pressing. I’ve seen no comments about how having anyone else hold the line might benefit us all, or at least slow down the speed with which our own medical and retirement benefits are being taken away.
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Talk of the Nation’s coverage of the transit strike was so incredibly biased I found it surprising even after seeing your post here. It seemed like Neal Conan was going out of his way to reinforce anti-labor comments while making little snipey comments about the pro-labor arguments. He’s in New York so was probably grumpy about it on a personal level, but it seemed like he was really letting it cloud his objectivity as a moderator.