White Collars Good, Blue Collars Bad

Blue Collars Bad, White Collars Good


By Tom Sullivan

December 14th, 2008 - 10:12pm ET


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How much collateral damage are Senate conservatives willing for America to incur so they can cripple the United Auto Workers? How many lost American jobs are acceptable to resuscitate a failed economic theory?

The Senate’s rejection last week of bridge loans for Detroit automakers proved the best display yet of Republican antipathy for organized labor. Popular opposition to the $700 billion bailout package for white-collar Wall Street businesses was palpable, but (heavens!) financial giants Bear Stearns and AIG were in peril. The package sailed through Congress with few strings.

Despite totaling two percent of Wall Street’s $700 billion aid package, opposition to aid for Detroit automakers is different. Joe Conason called it, “the bailout everyone loves to hate.”

Derivatives and credit default swaps are arcane instruments " many brokers who went under promoting them didn’t understand them. What makes Detroit's follies easier targets for critics is that cars are tangible. People understand cars " how they work, how many miles they get to the gallon, and how much a tank of gas costs.

Americans also know what they make an hour. So when politicians and pundits repeat the debunked talking point about union autoworkers making $70 or more an hour, people accept it and resent it more readily than $17,000 an hour for a CEO. The deepest resentments are among people most alike.

Exploiting those resentments provided cover for Senate conservatives stonewalling approval of bridge loans for the Big 3. Plus, the White House signaled it would step in with its remaining TARP funds - the outgoing president would take any heat.

It was no accident that prominent Republican spokesmen hailed from southern states with foreign auto plants. The Los Angeles Times quoted Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) on his southern colleagues:


"We have many senators from right-to-work states, and I quite frankly think they have no use for labor," he said. "Labor usually supports very heavily Democrats and I think that some of the lack of enthusiasm for this [bailout] was that some of them didn't want to do anything for the United Auto Workers."

Keeping Wall Street investment banks from collapsing was of vital national interest. Keeping blue collar workers at their jobs, not so much. And destroying a powerful auto union was a partisan confection not to be passed up. The e-mail sent to Senate Republicans last Wednesday spelled it out in black and white:


This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

Blue collars bad, white collars good.

What aid Congress should provide Detroit automakers is beside the point. Anger at industry mismanagement has overwhelmed concern for Americans guilty of working at the wrong place at the wrong time. As many as 2.5 million auto industry jobs are in peril, and workers' families too - people Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) chair, Elizabeth Warren, called “the heart and soul of this economy.” They are the point.

How quickly, post-Hurricane Katrina, has Congress forgotten the lessons of acting too little, too late.

Granted, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s cries of wolf over the $700 billion bank bailout left many suspicious. Yet that has become an occasion for undermining organized labor and sermonizing about the free-market imperative to do nothing. Better to let the Big 3 sink along with all hands.

Speaking of imperatives, there is a humanitarian tradition perhaps lost on congressional free-marketeers. An over-the-top analogy to our present situation, perhaps, it is the centuries-old maritime tradition of rendering assistance to those in peril at sea. It is also a legal obligation codified in 1914 in the Safety of Life at Sea Convention (SOLAS), enacted in response to the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It states:


"The master of a ship at sea which is in a position to be able to provide assistance, on receiving a signal from any source that persons are in distress at sea, is bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance . . ."

If a nearby boat is in distress, you don’t sail on because the endangered crew showers after work instead of before, because you think the captain was a fool, or because you believe the sea is a harsh mistress and seamen should sink or swim on their own.

Or in the present crisis, because

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