(12-06) 10:46 PST Chicago (AP) --
Workers laid off from their jobs at a factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.
About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began their sit-in Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant's operation.
Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days' notice required by law before shutting down.
Workers also were angered when company officials didn't show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, she said.
Good for them. You know, you never hear the end of these creatively sordid guesstimations of how the UAW is soaking the poor auto executives, even though the $73/hr. figure is bullshit and they've offered to make back-end concessions in the first place. Yet you hear nothing about the CEO:worker compensation ratio, which has ramped up exponentially in the past generation.
This is entirely consistent with how major players have dealt in bad faith all along, taking their cut out of the hides of workers and taxpayers. Wall Street bookies send their boy Hank Paulson in to demand a trillion dollars, without so much as an explanation of where the money will go or what it will do. It will be used to cover bad bets and fictitious wealth. They don't really even deny that, once you get past the "credit default swap" obfuscations.
Put more simply -- they are robbing each and every one of us to pay off their weak-ass nonsense, and if we're good little proles, maybe they'll graciously lend some of our own money back to us. Awful fucking large of them.
Meanwhile, the auto companies -- who have been run abysmally and greedily, and need to be pimp-slapped up and down the block, but still make an actual product, no matter how mediocre -- are lampooned and pilloried for coming hat in hand and asking for less than five percent of what Wall Street just came and took and put up their noses. Why? Because while politicians make the usual noises during campaign season about helping out reg'lar folks, when push comes to shove they don't really give much of a shit. That's not what their donors pay them to care about.
Besides, the Big Three will get what's theirs, and we all know it. It's just that it's necessary at this point for both sides to engage in this tedious kabuki that they're conducting rigorous oversight. Right. That way when they come back next year wanting another $50 bil or so, everyone will say what they're saying about the financial bailouts -- that since we're already balls deep in this, now we can't walk away.
But what plagues the automakers is not exactly what plagues the financial wizards. The latter group, I cannot repeat enough times, are merely bookies. They create nothing of tangible value, just elaborate risk-management regression-analysis formulas on Excel spreadsheets, which they trade amongst each other like baseball-card fetishists. The car companies, on the other hand, sunk themselves into a doomed product and revenue model, and health care and pension costs have caught up to them in the meantime. The collapse of their financing departments just sealed the deal.
I think it was a commenter in Krugman's column who pointed out that we'd all be better off if the government just stepped in right now, nationalized health care to the tune of $2-3 trillion across the board, with the proviso that businesses would have to leave the health-care portion of the workers' paycheck on as wages, thus immediately injecting bottom-up money back into the economy, which is the only way it's going to fully restore. Why not? It would cost the same for the businesses, and we're going to be eating this health-care shit sandwich at some point anyway, because we all dance to the tune of insurance and pharma companies.
This is a tremendously dangerous game these people are playing. It really amounts to stealing and hoarding on a massive scale, but without the usual means of control elites have typically exerted over burgeoning underclasses. Because all that money does them no good if the other 95% can't afford to buy anything. They can continue to rent their au pairs and pool boys and media time, but that's still a sliver of the overall "legitimate" economy. People will simply resort to whatever's available at that point, and you can scarcely blame them, once they realize that they are never going to get a fair shake. The system has failed them, has failed the vast majority of us.
It's nice that Obama has ambitious public works projects waiting in the wings, but those are temporary fixes for a systemic malaise which will only be compounded by future resource constraints. The idea that we're all going to continue to commute from the exurbs to our city jobs in peanut-oil-powered hovercars à la Jetsons is almost quaint in its short-sighted futility. Gas and oil are cheap right now, but OPEC will cut production, and even lower barrel price comes with its own set of constraints. Tar sands and coal-into-oil and other such low-EROEI tricks are not feasible below $80/bbl or so.
Smarter folks than myself have written extensively and comprehensively about the potential for "resilient community" networks, utilizing local and regional resource capabilities in everything from locavorism to scrip. Critics would respond that such a move would smack of austerity or even mass penury. But it's clearly a necessary move toward efficiency, something sorely lacking in how the system currently works. The waste and sag that leaves most people out manifests itself in income disparity and wage stagnation against top-5% excess, resulting in increasing economic stratification. Maybe it's time to opt out. Resilient communities are an opportunity to do so.
The fact of the matter is that the system as currently implemented provides less and less reason for the majority of people not to try something new, to re-engage with their communities in the process, to leave the thieves and robber barons on the outside looking in for a change. (Until they figure out how to control water supplies, that is.) It depends on whether there are enough people who can step back from the empty thrills of cheap toys and canned reality shows long enough to rediscover their own rational self-interest. It's worth a shot.
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