Jim Devine wrote:
The New York Times / December 10, 2008 By DAVID LEONHARDT ...It's a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the "$73/hour" pay of Detroit's workers with the "up to $48/hour" pay of workers at the Japanese companies. These retirees make up arguably Detroit's best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement...
Actually, the 'bad luck' was part of a top-down business-government class-war strategy, was it not, to avoid a social welfare state and increase the bargaining power of capital versus labor in the 1940s? That's the way Vicente Navarro explains the hostility to national health insurance, and I assume the same goes for pensions.
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