on Feb 26th, 2006Boxing for Jobs: Low Blow Wages versus Sucker Punch Governments
Oh, to be young, fresh out of college, and looking for a job where your chances of getting a pension, health benefits, and a decent wage are about as likely as getting a loan for a new house while working as a drive-through specialist at McDonald’s. Just to show you how basic things can get, I once noticed as I was going through a drive-through at McDonald’s a sign that read H.O.B. I asked the worker what it meant; I’ll bet you’ll never guess. Try: Hand out bag. That’s what the world and its wages have come to: the value of skilled labor is reduced to an intelligence that requires a major corporation to put a sign on the wall reminding its employees to hand out the bag at the end of the transaction.
What’s any job worth these days? With the price of labor being determined by workers coming out of poverty level standards of living around the globe, the choice of paying a higher wage, subject to all kinds of rules and regulations, or simply moving that job abroad to a country run by governments that care more about filling their Swiss bank accounts than doing right by their population, becomes a slap in the face of humanity. Whether you feel any pain or not is solely determined by whether you are older or younger.
Luckily, perhaps, the young can take a punch, but as any good boxer knows, all those punches to the body have a way of catching up to you in old age. Our advice: start shadow boxing with your soul before you get into the ring, then decide whether its worth the risk of getting knocked out by a corporate bully.
After more than a decade of failed strikes and job actions — mainly in Illinois, where Caterpillar has its biggest factories — the U.A.W. reluctantly accepted a two-tier contract that provides for significantly lower wages and benefits for newly hired employees. The new second tier is as much as $20 an hour below the cost of employing Mr. Doty, 50, and a dwindling band of other veterans.
As older workers depart, at Caterpillar and at other companies, the longstanding wage advantage that manufacturing workers enjoy over their counterparts in services or construction is shrinking fast. The trade-off is the promise of a manufacturing revival at long last in the old Rust Belt, as new hires come aboard at much lower labor costs.
Two Tiers, Slipping Into One
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
New York Times, February 26, 2006