Spitting on those who fight and strike for the common man.
Some thought process from the same people who voted for deficit and war. Strong Republican equals anti-union, its the mentality of the shortsighted. To what end? A return of the “peculiar institution”? This is not hyperbole this is the future. You will make no better then slave wages in the not so far future. Think about your children. Where will this go from here? Who do you have to thank for 25 dollars an hour?
Frank, who retired a few years ago from the Nissan plant, approves.
Corker “hit the nail on the head,” he said. “It seems like the United Auto Workers would rather have people lose their jobs than give up a few dollars in hourly pay.”
Different mentality equals let the Union people strike. Let the Union northerners fight the good fight:
Solomon, a native of Baltimore, said that when he first moved here he noticed how much people seemed to resist the idea of unions.
“I’m not sure what it was,” he said. “That’s just not the way they do things here.”
Doubled your pay? Sounds like a selfish anti-tax stance is not very beneficial to the mentally challenged. Speak your mind for you? How about pay your dues for you:
‘Top dollar’
Kathy Ward doubled her pay 27 years ago when she left a purchasing job at a mental health hospital for a purchasing job at the plant. She is now a technician making $24.92 an hour.“Some were wholehearted for the union, I was wholehearted against,” she recalled of the last union vote in 2001. “I don’t need anyone to speak my mind for me. And I certainly don’t want to pay someone to doit for me. The company has been very good to us.”
Indeed, the couple owns a big house — five bedrooms and three baths — on an acre of land about six miles from the plant. The mortgage is paid. They have Nissan vehicles for everyday driving as well as a ’32 Ford and a ’72 Chevelle. They’ve taken a cruise to Nassau, in the Bahamas, and next year, when Kathy retires at 55, they will take one to Alaska.
“To us, $25 an hour is top dollar,” she said, “and I’m very thankful for it.”
Oh, well this is not your problem right? Not yet:
The biggest difference in the labor costs is that the foreign automakers don’t have to pay for legions of retirees — their workers are younger and haven’t received benefits that are as generous, Dziczek said.
So once again self-interest plays into the hands of the plutocracy. Could we possibly, just once, stand with the great Union that is the United States? The Union from which all your benefits flow. Are we naive to wait for that day?
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; now we know that it is bad economics;” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Ya’know, “the South” doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the problem. It’s the corporations that you should be blaming. All the South did was sit here for a hundred years after the Civil War being impoverished. We’re just the first Third World Country the CEO’s chose for out-sourcing. Everything is cheaper here than in “the Union,” including labor costs. $25 an hour is damn good wages in this part of the world. Just like a $1 a day is good wages in Asia. What are you gonna do? Start bashing peasants in Thailand for being grateful for their jobs?
You’d think from the way you’re carrying on that there never were unions down here. Don’t you remember “Norma Rae”? Sally Field won an Oscar for it. The Bottom Line moved the textile mills and sewing machines to China. When the Chinese start making a decent living, I bet they’ll move the jobs to Africa.
So stop with the divisive North-South shit and focus on the real problem — unregulated, unaccountable-to-anybody, profit-at-any-cost capitalism. There’s your enemy!
Its a mindset. You have been manipulated by the corporations. I agree. I live in Virginia. The title is a wakeup call. Impoverished for a 100 years? Had the south not attacked reconstruction in all its forms that then did not need to be the case. Racism the Southern Baptists and the corporations have kept the southern states from reaching their full potential.
Here is another quote from the article:
sjct try this read: American Theocracy it was an eye opener.
Any argument that pits one part of this country against another is based on sweeping bullshit generalizations. Period.
I live in a small town in eastern NC and the workers for the biggest employer here are unionized and they vote Democratic. So who’s being manipulated? All working Southerners? Or Northern workers who get told Southerners are their problem?
And let me tell you, racism in the South was maintained by Southern DEMOCRATS! You know, those guys that Nixon brought into the Republican fold with his famous “Southern Strategy.” Just stop swinging with that broad brush already; you’re getting tar on yourself. 😉
Yes, obviously the title is a generalization. Sorry if I hit a nerve.
There are a diversity of people who live in the former states of the Confederacy. And the experience with unions is very different from one to another.
The unions lost popular support in the South with the failure of national unions to push FDR to deal with the union busting violence during the 1938 Textile Workers Strike. The attitude was that the union would set them up to be beaten or killed but would not come to their aid because some folks in the North might have to deal with the race issue and also powerful economic interests in the South.
As late as the 1960s, there was at least one Southern politician who still supported union interest, Olin D. Johnston of South Carolina. But he also fought civil rights legislation.
But unions are in resurgence (slowly it’s true) in the South as workers start to transcend racial and ethnic divides. The most recent victory was at a Smithfield Inc. plant in North Carolina, the largest pork processing plant in the US. Smithfield is well known in the US for the way it cures its hams.
Painting a large and diverse population with a broad brush is always misleading. For example, Elizabeth Dole voted for cloture and there were a bunch of other Southern Republicans who ducked the vote entirely.