"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration." - Abraham Lincoln; First Annual Message to Congress, December, 1861.

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About Detroit, first comes envy. . . then comes Schadenfreude; a $5.00 word that translates as glee when “he gets his.”

Word is out that GM and Chrysler claim they need more. This missive is prompted by that word.

To one degree or another, at various times, everyone takes private delight in the misfortunes of others.

No? When you’ve been waiting for what seems an interminable slow grind of minutes, waiting in the grocery market checkout line, a clerk suddenly opens an adjacent register and the shopper behind you recklessly races over to grab that spot in the new line, and the clerk’s scanner doesn’t recognize one of that customer’s items, and the need for a “price-check on Register 3” leaves that oh-so-eager-beaver abruptly mired in a retail twilight zone . . . you’re going to tell me that you don’t smile inwardly?

You’re lying, and you know it.

Not the lying part, the smiling part: that’s Schadenfreude. And there’s been an awful lot of it lately, as it relates to the plight of the American autoworker.

There are so many principles working here, principles of equal weight, that I’m going to raise them in no order of preference. They’re all equal.

As background, my now-deceased father worked for a few years at GM’s Warren Tech Center as a designer. Later, he secured a similar position with Ford, only a handful of minutes from our home and for better money. He worked for Ford until he retired. He was not in the UAW, he was white collar. And until their deaths, both he and my mother enjoyed full benefits: a generous retirement package, and 100% medical that included dental, vision, and hearing.

Following my Army discharge at Fort Carson, Colorado, I motored north on I-25 to Denver. For a year I worked in the GM warehouse just west of old Stapleton Airport. I was in the UAW. When in the summer of ’68 that I moved back to Michigan, to enter college, ‘prior to’ I worked on GM’s Willow Run assembly line, about ten miles westerly along I-94 from Ann Arbor.

My job on the line: assembling the loose and constantly in revolt wires that were to compose a car-seat frame. Anybody think that’s easy? Tell you what, I’ll take three wire clothes hangars, cut the hook ends off, then let’s see how well you do — configuring the gathered into a cube . . . as the intended assemblage moves before your station, down a conveyor belt. I quit after four and one-half days! That summer of ‘68 was also the last time I was in anyone’s union.

While I was in the Army, Cliff Ford, my next door neighbor while I was growing up, worked in one of the slit-pits, installing transmissions at the Cadillac assembly line in Detroit. You may think you’ve done hard work at some time in your life. Lemme tell you: You ain’t done nothing harder than spending one-third of a day, day-in, day-out, in the dark, dank and gloom of a slit-pit, lifting transmissions into place. Cliff was in the UAW. He made enough to support himself in dignity. And he earned every cent.

“Unions: they’ve ruined this country.” As have you, I’ve heard that more times than I can count. Perhaps, unlike you, every time I’ve heard it, for two reasons, it makes me as angry as anything else can.

The first is because it demonstrates what must be the near total ignorance of the speaker. “Ruined” is an adjective, an absolute, connoting the object has been damaged beyond repair; “beyond repair.” When something has been so completely damaged, the only thing left to do with it is to toss it on the trash heap.

You either love this country, or you don’t; no middle ground. My request to those who feel it has been ruined absolutely beyond repair, is to just get the hell out . . . NOW! We don’t need your ignorance and we don’t need your attitude. Both bring us down.

The second reason is because it just is not so, that the unions have wrought anything damaging. Rather, whether you’re a retail clerk or an engineer in a high-tech company, every employment benefit you enjoy — from vacation time, to overtime pay, some minimum wage floor, to fully-paid or some employer-contribution medical insurance, to defined-benefit or defined-contribution retirement — is a benefit you did not earn. A union, and most especially the UAW, won that for you in battles with hard-as-nails employers who relaxed their absolute strangleholds only grudgingly.

The most pertinent question each of us must ask ourselves is whether we feel an American should be expected to toil long and hard, yet not be able to provide the basics necessary to support him- or herself and a family; shelter, food, clothing, etc., whether he or she should be expected to toil long and hard, yet still have to live with a parent, and receive some government assistance?

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.” — Abraham Lincoln; First Annual Message to Congress, December, 1861.

The autoworkers played no part in the mess in which the manufactures are now ensconced. They have given back, and they have given back, and they have given back, and they have gotten pitifully little in return.

As I noted earlier, my father worked most his life as a designer for Ford. And for all my developing years the Michigan manufacturers were bent by supreme arrogance. On the presumption they could make whatever they wanted and that Americans would have no choice but to buy vehicles designed to break down and wear out, “designed obsolescence,” they made vehicles that were shoddy and unsafe. “Hmggh . . . what are you going to do, buy some Japanese car, or a VW?” The UAW had no role in those arrogant designs. What the UAW did was to toil long and hard in the pits, assembling what was provided to them by management.

But it isn’t only management’s fault either. The ethereal whims of the American car-buying public share a goodly part of the blame. Prior to the late 70's Arab oil embargo, derision was all that met anyone who'd stoop so low as to have a Toyota or a Datsun (now Nissan) or a VW bug in the driveway. Come the embargo, and as there had never been a first suggestion by Americans they'd consider a smaller, more fuel efficient car, none were even on one of the Big-3's drawing boards, and the Toyotas and Datsuns and VWs began to sell. Detroit had been snookered by a marketing circumstance no one could have predicted, and a circumstance, the duration of which, no one could forecast. Almost as immediately as Detroit put a smaller, more fuel efficient version on the street, the embargo was over, gas prices and supplies stabilized, and the gas-guzzler was in; bigger than ever. Folks in Phoenix and Tampa who had never seen snow in their lives had to have the most humongous 4WD SUV they could lay their hands on. So, Detroit responded with the Lincoln Navigator and the Cadillac Escalade, and much of the country signed their names on first, second and third mortgages that were on reams of paper filled with snares and traps that few attorneys could comprehend, all to keep up with the neighbors.

And those mortgages were bundled by bankers, and shares were sold on those now securitized instruments around the globe. Everybody owned a piece of something, and no one was on the hook for much. "I'd like to renegotiate my loan, who do I go to?" "I don’t know. A thousand, maybe ten thousand investors around the world own a piece of it." When the balancing egg tumbled to the floor and cracked, as employers began to shut down and stopped paying workers to work producing things and services that no one wanted, as homes fell into the foreclosure abyss, everyone was to blame and no one trusted anyone, and no one would venture out onto the limb to buy a new car, or finance one.

It all began on the charade of "fair trade," that never was "fair". It was a Republican philosophy that overwhelmingly Democratic office holders purchased in toto. Ship US manufacturing jobs en masse to some Third World backwater site on the disingenuous guise that that will enable the country to which those jobs have been shipped to be an equal market for "other" US goods. Not that anyone ever specified what those equivalent US goods would be. No one had to. Just call it "fair trade" often enough and loud enough and, like some magician's coin, drawn from some foil's ear, voila it's "fair trade". And by some dint of self-contained, delusion of truth, the 40- and 50-something laid-off US workers would go to a community college for training in a much higher paying position in the high-tech industry, or perhaps as an EMT, and everyone would be a winner.

I don’t know what the answer is, to extend or not extend more taxpayer funds to the auto industry. I don’t like the idea, having to go to China or Mexico or South Korea or Japan for mechanized battle equipment, and for parts. Bankruptcy is not an option. No one will plop down $20,000-plus in cash, or sign a 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, or 7-year contract on a vehicle from a manufacturer who’s in bankruptcy. (Anything beyond three years is nuts, on its face. But hey! That’s what was going on.)

What I do know is that not a nickel’s worth of the over-the-cliff mess the industry is in is traceable to anyone in the UAW. Nonetheless, there’s an awful lot of Schadenfreude going around. “They just got greedy” is typical of a lot of what I hear. One, I’d like the name of just one line worker who, after spending 30 years on it, was wealthy as a result. Please, just one name. Two, as to “greedy;” when a man or woman works hard, damned hard, is it greedy to be able to live in a modest house, and able to raise a family in modest comfort, and take a few weeks off every year, to spend with the family, and to take a sick or injured child to the hospital without risking bankruptcy . . . Is that greedy?

Yeah . . . Schadenfreude; an awful lot of that toxin going around, and I just wish it’d stop.

— Ed Tubbs

Authors Bio:
An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."