The Expansionist

Friday, October 21, 2005

Chopping American Wages. George F. Will, contemptible rightwing pundit, is cheering the impoverishment of American labor. His column in today's New York Post calls health insurance and other fringe benefits of American workers "welfare"! We don't earn these things as an integral part of our compensation for services rendered. No, they are given to us as welfare! Slit his throat. I mean that literally. His odious commentary contains this observation:

Robert "Steve" Miller, [bankrupt former General Motors subsidiary, auto-parts maker] Delphi's CEO, minces no words, telling The Wall Street Journal that defined benefit programs are imprudent anachronisms: "The notion of having all your retirement eggs in one basket — your employer — is a concentration of risk that is simply inadvisable for anyone in today's fast-moving economy." He calculates that a competitive American industrial compensation cost is about $20 an hour. And to get to a total compensation cost of $20, including health care, retirement and workers' compensation "which is high in the states we are in like New York, Ohio and Michigan," you have to have a basic hourly wage of $10. Pay at Delphi's plants in China is roughly $3 an hour.

Miller bluntly says that the post-1945 social contract is being — must be — repealed because, given globalization, unskilled manual labor cannot be paid $65 an hour [including all benefits], with the cost passed on to consumers.

Pray, who is going to buy anything if working people's incomes are reduced to a pittance?
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Why on Earth would American workers accept having their compensation being chopped by 70%? Anyone who smiles upon so catastrophic a development, an attack upon the idea that Americans, who built and maintain our First World economy, should be reduced to the level of the Third World, is an enemy of the United States, to be destroyed.
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What is Delphi CEO Miller's compensation? $20 an hour, all fringe benefits included? Oh, no. He is "skilled" labor. What is fair compensation for skilled labor in the global marketplace? $25 an hour? $30?
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Americans must wake up to the fact that the ruling class of our economy and government has become our enemy, and draw the necessary conclusions. We need full-scale, two-sided class warfare in this country, with the poor, working class, and middle class fiting back. Right now there's only a one-sided war being carried out by the rich against all the rest of us. How can it be that we let them get away with this? There are far more of Us than of Them. They should be very, very scared of Us, because We have the literal power of life and death over Them.
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Free trade cannot but destroy everything we have built in this country. We cannot possibly compete with the Third World without making the United States into a Third World country too. I do not consent to that.
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(Responsive to "GM's Welfare Problem", column by George F. Will in the New York Post, October 21, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,992.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:53 PM

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