COMPANY FOCUSES WAGE ATTACK ON ENGINEERS

A long time friend sent a couple of articles from the Seattle Times concerning the union management interaction in a major airline manufacturer. I found the articles especially disturbing but was unable to figure out why. I spent a couple of weeks thinking about this. What exactly was missing in my understanding of what was happening with that major company? The company was shifting jobs around the nation, in fact, shifting them around the world. In one instance, the move created two thousand jobs in a distant state, with the note that the taxpayers of that new state were giving the company $150 million per year for over ten years in tax breaks. Simple arithmetic tells us that is $75,000 per job per year or 150,000 per year per job; often less than they pay the workers. In other words, that state of Missouri’s taxpayers are paying what the company should be paying  in taxes for creating and maintaining infrastructure and, in some cases, even paying part of the salary—instead the tax money goes directly in to what is called company profits. That to me is disturbing but we are getting used to it because this same thing is happening in state after state; perhaps New York and North Carolina are the worst; it has so slowly crept into our thinking that we treat it as being and acceptable thing to do. However, this has reached a point where states after state are competing wildly to see which state can give what industries the biggest tax break, an enviable condition for industrialists and something for Republican governors to brag about. This is obviously bad for working class America,  which I find disturbing, but there was something else, perhaps something more subtle, but what?

When we look around the nation, we see more and more minimum wage jobs appearing—people working hard but not still being able to support themselves. The people who are filling these jobs were ex middle class workers that politicians and corporations (some claim they are the same) have forced into low paying jobs. In addition, new laws have allowed management to shorten the workweek to allow the company to avoid paying pensions and other benefits for full time workers so there income is low but also their future is dim. This creates a situation where the companies to pay the workers a weekly wage below poverty levels, which mean the are eligible to receive welfare; food stamps, aid for dependent children, rent subsidies, etc. This is a way for the fast food industry to divert taxpayer money to these workers to support their families.

Rather than the company paying wages, the money goes directly to profits, which in the end is no different from state legislatures giving tax breaks to corporations to attract them to theirs states. In the case of the airline company, the people who are losing their jobs are not people who cannot afford to move to a new location, such as low skilled, low wageworkers; they are engineers, physicists, and highly skilled workers such as machinists. What the Seattle Times Business/Technology articles do not say is that the company offers certain of these highly skilled and experienced people the chance to move but to do so they have to give up their seniority and accept a much lower wage, without longevity, without pensions, etc. There may be 2,000 new jobs in the new state location but not 2,000 new workers. What I think that I was missing was thinking about where 2,000 experienced engineers, physicist, and machinists come from in a state that does not have an existing airplane building industry, not the kinds of jobs a man on the streets can fill like flipping hamburgers.  

I think what we are seeing, and what I was missing, is that big business has been successful in decimating the low end of the middle class by getting rid or lowering the wages of unskilled labor, the assembly workers, the janitorial staff, the security guards, etc. Company executives are now moving to attack the upper end of the middle class and moving more taxpayer money into the corporate profit column. This is what I call MBA-ism: the greed driven curriculum they are teaching in Harvard business school—profit over morality. 

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