Yesterday, thousands of students and workers across the country got a day off from work and school to pay homage to the labor force. Considering the current economic climate, it seems kind of hard to believe that a national holiday still exists for a group that has been responsible for so much economic hardship. The federal government boldly claimed that General Motors and Chrysler were too big to fail. Political pundits and economists demanded that the government act urgently to ensure that the big three stay in business.
Well, maybe if assembly line workers weren’t getting paid $73 per hour to sit at on a chair and drill a few screws in for a slaving eight hours per day, GM and Chrysler could have afforded to lower the costs of their vehicles. It’s pretty hard to show a profit when you’re forced to jack up the prices of your cars and use cheaper, less desirable materials so that you can pay workers $73 dollars per hour.
Who would want to spend an arm and a leg to purchase a car without power locks and that has plastic interior when you could just buy a much better quality Honda for about two thirds the price?
On average, Toyota pays their assembly line workers $48 per hour. As a result, Toyota and most other Japanese automakers are able to save more money and invest it in technology, product quality, and customer service. Hence, Toyota has seen remarkable success in recent years, providing dependable automobiles to millions of customers and employing millions of Americans along the way. With their bloated wages and benefit structures, Detroit just can’t compete.
Labor unions were indisputably one of the main reasons for the recent bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler. You know, the event that caused thousands of working class families around the nation to get up in tears and demand that the federal government give them a billion dollar bailout.
But, I still see headlines and Facebook statuses praising the alleged virtues of big labor. What is so virtuous creating a system in which the most industrious worker gets paid just as much as the laziest?
The land of opportunity? Well, if someone can devote his or her entire life to becoming a more productive worker, and still only get paid as much as the least productive one, then I guess hard work is essentially useless.
What type of message does this send to society? You can work your ass off by spending upwards of 80 hours per week at a factory, but you wont get any material reward for it? You can’t see the fruits of your labor. However, you will get a very warm, fuzzy feeling deep down inside from knowing that you slaved your entire life promoting this wonderful thing called “equality.”
People always complain about the greedy CEO’s of the fortune 500 companies who make millions of dollars. Supposedly, they didn’t “earn” all that money. But, what did the high school drop out who earns over $70 per hour working a 40-hour workweek in the slums of Detroit do to earn his money? It’s not like most of those assembly line workers had to take out thousands of dollars in student loans to pay for college. Heck, a lot of them didn’t even graduate high school. But, somehow, it’s okay for them to earn all that money.
But since we give labor a federal holiday, let’s go ahead and have a Large Financial Firm CEO Day to celebrate their contribution to the current economic climate as well. Or maybe we should rename Labor Day to reflect reality? I think Scary Cartel That Bankrupts American Manufacturers While Donating All Your Money to Democrats Day has a nice ring to it.
Big labor may have served a purpose decades ago when squalid working conditions, child labor and 12-hour workdays were the norm. But with today’s framework of labor safety protections, labor unions ‘ purpose is at best miniscule, at worst non-existent.
Lance Newman is a regular contributor to The D.C. Writeup
Loading ...