The Windsor Star: Beyond auto sector, save ailing communities

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/editorial/story.html?id=1a28d285-4935-490b-b013-a19c22ec3ad6

Sam Gindin, Special to The Windsor Star
Published: Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The global crisis quickly engulfing us threatens to become the worst since the Great Depression, and this means that past ways of doing things need to be fundamentally rethought.

But Gord Henderson's focus on wage cuts for autoworkers in his Nov. 20 column is the absolutely wrong way to go -- that much we already learned from the 1930s, when competitive cuts in workers' wages only aggravated the depression. When Henderson responds to CAW president Ken Lewenza's defence of workers' wages with a glib "Tell that to all those low-wage Mexican autoworkers," what exactly does this mean?

In the face of the general concern that consumers are retrenching (and business consequently holding back investments), how much sense does it make to advocate autoworkers setting a pattern for lower wages and less purchasing power? And what kind of notion of progress and vision for the future does the target of Mexican wage standards suggest?

The fact is that Canadian hourly compensation in the auto industry is now below the U.S., at about par with Japan and less than three-quarters of hourly compensation in Germany (U.S. Bureau of Labour data for 2006, adjusted for current exchange rates).

Because the industry is integrated into the American industry, Canada is affected by the higher costs in the U.S., particularly that of health care. But here, too, the answer is hardly to blame the workers, but rather to point to the social and economic stupidity of the U.S. not having the kind of single-payer public health care system that is common in the rest of the developed world.

Where the union can be blamed is not in what it has achieved for working people, but in its refusal to play a leading role in challenging the direction of the industry, especially in terms of its laggard move to fuel-efficient, non-polluting vehicles. Saving future jobs -- and also addressing the thousands of lost jobs of former members whom the bailout won't bring back -- necessitates correcting that earlier shortcoming in two specific ways.

FULL 2 page story at link.

[SidDithers]

1. "social and economic stupidity...

of the U.S. not having the kind of single-payer public health care system that is common in the rest of the developed world."

Nails it right there. Thanks for posting.

Sid