Lean Left

It is this:

DETROIT — Among workers building the Jeep Grand Cherokee here, there are few obvious distinctions. Clutching lunch sacks and mini-coolers, they trudge together through the turnstiles at the plant’s main gate each day to tinker with the same vehicles, along the same assembly line, performing the same tasks.

Yet they fall into distinctly unequal classes: About half make $28 an hour or more, while the rest, the recently hired, make $14.

This oddity, which could become the norm in much of the domestic U.S. auto industry, arises from the jury-rigged labor agreement that the United Auto Workers, U.S. automakers and the federal government reached during the industry’s near-death experience last year.

The bankers were not required to change their pay structure despite getting an order of magnitude more in government money than the auto workers did. In fact, the GOP screamed like someone threatened their children when it was suggested that bakers bonuses be curtailed in light of the face that they brought down the world economy and required massive government handouts to survive.

Auto workers, who were about to lose their jobs only because the afore-mentioned bankers destroyed the world economy, on the other hand, were required to make massive sacrifices. If you want to understand America and the result of the Reagan Revolution, you don’t need to look much past that discrepancy. With their union-busting, attack on government regulation, and worship of thre capital class, they helped create a world in which the fools and criminals who take down the entire economy are allowed to prosper with all the government help they need but that their victims are forced to beg and grovel and destroy their futures in order to survive their presents.