Jonathan Cohn has an excellent article in "The New Republic" regarding the Detroit bailout and the legacy of the United Auto Workers, focusing particularly on its role in helping to create the modern American middle class. And while I recommend that you read the entire article, what really struck me is the many comments just dripping with contempt for the Union, assembly line workers, and the notion generally that people deserve any kind of economic security. They are well worth reading, reflecting as they do a peculiar mean-spiritedness that seems to permeate a substantial group of Americans. Basically, the attitude seems to be either 1) only well educated people deserve economic security and I am so supremely educated I will never know want; or 2) those unionized dirt bags make more money than I do and none of us, my miserable self included, deserve any kind of dignity whatsoever that our employers do not voluntarily bestow on us. Depressing.
With respect to point one above, this seems to me to embody the attitude of many a mainstream journalist toward unionized workers, i.e. who are these blue collar monkeys to think that they deserve health care and pensions and living wages and the like? Last week, however , I attended a Christmas party that included among its attendees a number of pretty well placed print journalists and a few who make their living as on-line journalists. A certain gloom was evident among a good number of them. One of the latter was noting to me that he felt outsourcing was inevitably coming to the newsroom and that he saw the newspaper industry unraveling in a fashion at least as dramatic as the domestic auto industry. He foresaw a lot of his peers either losing their jobs or taking deep pay cuts and wondered when this happens if we will start to get a different kind of journalism around issues like outsourcing, free trade, job security, etc? I am afraid that we will soon see if this is the case.
