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Money for Profit vs Money for People

Crisis in the auto industry is hardly limited to Detroit. Japan’s Toyota is hurting big time--a two-year old truck plant in San Antonio was shut down for a few months this year. And the opening of a new Prius plant in Mississippi was put on hold. Toyota’s U.S. production overall was cut 20 percent and China just loaned its Chery Automobile Company $1.45 billion after losses there.

Why aren't people buying cars? You can't blame the price of gas -- not this week. The problem is the lack of credit -- and that's masking what's really at fault. Falling wages. Check out your paycheck, if you still have one: since 2004, real wages in the U.S. are down despite huge profits for a few under George W. Bush.

People simply don’t make enough money to buy cars: hence the need for credit. The auto bailout is the first that might actually put some money in workers' pockets. And not just auto-workers' pockets. Today, one in ten Americans receive foodstamps and most of those recipients go to work everyday. Tax dollars pay for those stamps—so have we the taxpayers been subsidizing corporate profits? You bet. To allow corporate wages? You bet.

But money for profit is never as controversial as money for people. In today's crisis we have a chance to change that. MORE

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has ordered all state agencies to stop doing business with Bank of America until they resolve a standoff with employees of Republic Windows and Doors. According to Mark Meinster, an organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) on GRITtv, the employees are asking for wages owed them under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) as well as pay for vacation accrued and benefits. Meinster also noted that it is still unclear why the factory was closed. Whether Bank of America cut off the company’s line of credit or if the company is seeking to simply downsize and relocate. “We know we’re being lied to by one or both parties,” Meinster said.MORe

If you organize it, he will come

There are various threads to this story: A company that violates federal law by refusing laid-off workers 60 days severance plus owed vacation and sick time and the plant's connection to the federal Wall Street bailout bill (the company blames Bank of America, which got $25 billion from the feds supposedly so it could loan money, for imposing the condition that it not pay the workers; a claim the bank now denies).

Another is real estate: The factory sits on Goose Island, traditionally home to manufacturing but in recent years a target for gentrification and upper-income homes. The value of the property upon which Republic Windows and Doors sits has likely risen dramatically and the company probably wants to sell it at a healthy profit. This is one of the consequences of capitalism: factors that have little to do with supply and demand impinge upon the lives of everyday people, dislocate them and lead to hardship after tragedy, one family at a time. The way that real estate speculation imposes upon other industries is one of the grand failures of an unregulated "free market."

So far, the stated goal of the union is to assure that its workers get the severance pay owed them, with some vague rhetoric toward saving the factory and its jobs. What we haven't heard (yet) is a serious proposal that, since the company has shirked its responsibilities, the workers themselves take over ownership of the factory and share the profits it generates instead of continuing to see them surrendered to the middlemen in suits that push papers, count beans and sit on boards of directors.

As the US economy worsens (and this is absolutely related to international trade agreements like NAFTA that send US jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, where owners can violently repress unions and organizers and aren't subject to serious environmental or safety regulations) the union can choose to nibble at the margins - say, get 60 days pay and then it's goodbye - or push for the viable long-term solution: to own their own jobs.MORe