Scabs Wanted; Immediate Employment Available
An interesting "help wanted" ad appeared in several cities' papers yesterday: "Employment offered to applicants responding to this advertisement will be to fill anticipated attrition replacement openings after negotiations or in place of employees involved in this strike." [Emphasis added.] You guessed it– the ads were placed by American Axle. CBC News reports the company ran the ad in cities where they have a plants which have been shut down by the UAW strike. Of course, the official AA party line, as espoused by spokeswoman Renee Rogers is: "We expect that once an agreement is reached with the UAW a significant number of associates will participate in buyouts and early retirements. We are currently preparing a pool of potential new associates." The auto supplier also sent letters to workers who were laid off before the strike began, asking them to come back to work. The UAW responded by calling for a mass picket today outside AA's headquarters. Meanwhile, there's no apparent break in the impasse between labor and management; their full negotiating teams haven't met since March 10.
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I am graduating in May with a BSN (Bachelors in Nursing) I am 55yrs old. I was in the grocery business for many years (Safeway) with the low cost labor pressure applied to this business. Wages have not gone up much at all for the long time employees and there is now a two tier wage/benefit scale. Retirement benefits are rapidly going away. I was able (many thanks to my wife) to go back to school.
@Ryan Knuckles and MikeInCanada: Congratulations on your educational and career successes. But your own success may be obscuring the 'bigger picture'. The bigger picture is that not everyone can be an engineer, or a lawyer, or a statistician. And even if everyone could, all that would do is transfer the wages race-to-the-bottom from low-skill labor markets to higher-skill labor markets. Furthermore, there will always be a need for someone to be janitors, hotel maids, short-order cooks, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI8hcthsTpU For the past 20-30 years, the US has largely relied on immigrant labor (legal or otherwise) to do low-skill low-pay work. But we're starting to run into both social and economic limits on how much we can do that.
Eric_S, That is the biggest bunch of bull anyone ever threw out. The percentage of the population that is incapable of ever rising above low skill labor is very small. Also, if everyone capable of doing moving up would, then the wages would rise. The other thing that would happen would be that technological and productivity advances would result that would increase everyones standard of living drastically. The idea that the race to the bottom for wages (which is built on a bunch of phony statistics to begin with) would move up the career scale is based on a zero-sum world view. You sound like one of these demagogues running around talking about how average household income has fallen. Of course household income has fallen - WE HAVE SMALLER HOUSEHOLDS and they contain less working age members. Average wages have increased in real dollars. The vast majority of the so called poor today have a car, air conditioning, multiple tv's, DVD players, iPods, cell phones, and no sign of a bare cubbard. Most of these people are living better than I did for most of my life for Pete's sake. So what are these so called social and economic limits keeping us from attracting more people to take the jobs that our poor are too wealthy to want?