Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasmallen | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Auto 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.

What 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.

What 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.

A union is a cartel now? Are you shitting me? It's amazing how anti-labor people are nowadays.

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.

The 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.

That's good point. However, the UAW's ability and tendency to blockade the factory entrance could be _worse_ than a regular firm or a cartel in some respects.

Er, yes, well of course, that was my point.

Being an autoworker is not a skilled job anymore. Anyone can learn to do this.

Anyone can learn to be a computer programmer too. It's called a skill. Unskilled labor requires very little learning, if any.

Ask an intro to CS Teacher about that. Many would disagree.

I 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.

Your confusing the engineers with grunts.

Not the way it was told to me. Though, to be fair, this was a non-union workplace (and actually they made buses, not cars). The grunts could be all gone.

> 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.

Detroit has been fucked for a long long time.

In 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com