>On Fri, June 26, 1998 at 12:22:02 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>>I know the righteous thing to do is to support the Flint strikers, but
>>there was a comment in one of the papers the other day from a Wall Street
>>analyst who said something like, "In this world you can't sustain $44 an
>>hour jobs assembling wire harnesses." Really, how can you?
>
>As Michael Moore said last night to Ted "The Hair, The Hair" Koppel,
>with $26 billion (?) in profits over the past 5 (?) years?
Yes, but that just won't cut it. GM is the laggard among the Big Three (can we still say that now that Daimler is about to own Chrysler?), and Wall Street is deeply unhappy with it. In other words, instead of $26b, it should probably be $52b. On top of that, if you can find equally productive workers in Mexico who are paid in a week what some U.S. and Canadian workers earn in an hour or two - well, you don't need an MBA to figure that one out. Sustaining those $44/hr jobs would require taking on capitalism itself, and I don't see the UAW about to do that.
Doug