Nat Weinstein's Project

I owe my friends at Socialist Viewpoint some attention. The last few issues have not caught my fancy, but the May/June edition contains much of interest. So I clicked over there to prepare this post, and discovered that the paper's founder, Nat Weinstein, has just passed away. He was 89 years old.

There is a well-written and remarkably generous obituary in Socialist Action, here, authored by Jeff Mackler. Louis Proyect also publishes some thoughts on Nat's passing.

I never met Mr. Weinstein, something I now regret. Among other things, he loved political discussion. I imagine that he and I could have spent a few enjoyable hours over coffee in conversation. I don't know if that would be true--it may be he'd never talk to a Republican--but I can hope. Now there's no way to ever know.

I don't agree with my Trotskyist friends, but I do respect them. Mr. Weinstein is very much worthy of respect. He was skilled as a painter. Mr. Mackler tells a funny story:

Highly skilled, Nat could paint a pine board to look like any kind of quality wood or stone. He was fond of telling the story of his experience in marbleizing several dozen giant wooden pillars in a huge downtown San Francisco commercial building. While high on a scaffold, Nat remembered, he had been denounced by a woman below, who was outraged that he appeared to be painting over the building’s beautiful “marble” pillars. He recalled that the woman was astonished to learn that the opposite was the case!

That passion extended to politics. Nat spent the WWII years in the Merchant Marine. Mr. Proyect quotes from Nat's wife, Sylvia Weinstein, who wrote

My husband had become a socialist while sailing on a ship to Venezuela. It was a three month trip, and he was a captive audience to a Trotskyist shipmate. I still have the letters he wrote me—three v-mail letters which started off with, “At last I have found the truth.” I thought he had become a Jehovah Witness.

The religious reference is revealing. I don't want to get into philosophical differences between Marxism and religion, but surely all passionate people have a religious-like impulse. Theirs is a moral cause, not just a pragmatic one. Nat's shipboard conversion led to a life-long passion that he carried to the day he died. I say that not with condescension, but rather with admiration. We who are without passion accomplish nothing.

In this spirit I now pay homage to Nat Weinstein by taking his newspaper seriously.

The May/June headliner is written by Gregg Shotwell.  The article is a deeply personal description of the Marxist theory of alienation. He started his career as a machine operator in Widdicomb’s furniture factory.

I loved the feel of wood in my hands. The smell of cherry, mahogany, and ash. Walnut was the most aromatic. It was intoxicating like roasting coffee. Sawdust is a fragrance that provokes memories as ancient and arousing as tools made by hands deep in the forest of our collective memory. Wood, even kiln-dried wood, feels and looks alive. I studied the grain of each piece before I cut, shaped, bored, or mitered it to fit. The work was satisfying and the job was integrated.

To support his growing family, he moved to the higher-paying but soul-deadening job at General Motors.

The first day I walked through the doors of GM, my body cringed. Every day for the next thirty years, my body cringed when I walked through the doors of GM. My senses felt assaulted by the noise and toxic vapors. A cloud of oil and coolant hung in the air. The concussion of mechanical clamor penetrated my body and hammered my eardrums. Everyone shouted. Curses were a natural response to the environment.  

At Widdicomb’s I considered eighty-eight pieces high volume. The production rate on my first job at GM was 88,000 pieces for eight hours of work.  

Eleven thousand pieces-per-hour is 183.33 parts-per-minute, more than three parts-per-second, and we had to accelerate the rate if we wanted to take any breaks. And we did.  

At Widdicomb’s there was only one shift. We never worked more than eight hours a day. If we had to work on Saturday, we only worked until noon. At GM ten hours was mandatory. All three shifts worked every Saturday. Sixty hours a week on top of a big hourly raise meant I was in the money. It also meant that I was paying for the money with my life. I was grinding 660,000 valve lifters a week.  

I didn’t like the job. I promised myself it was temporary, but I didn’t foresee what old timers called, “the golden handcuffs”—overtime, pension, benefits—or what pundits called, “the social contract.” Pundits didn’t understand that our work experience was dis-integrated and the so-called “social contract” bound us to a dehumanized system of labor. It was in effect an anti-social contract. 

Mr. Shotwell does us a service with his vivid description of a 20th Century automobile plant. He should then be doubly happy that such jobs first moved overseas, and are now rapidly disappearing altogether, replaced by robots. But I don't think he is. He wants future generations to enjoy the "benefits" of golden handcuffs. Unionism was founded to protect the interests of the proletariat, but when there is no proletariat, the benefits of a union disappear.

If it is any consolation, I believe the craft work that both Mr. Shotwell so enjoyed early in his career, and that Nat pursued for his entire working life, is making a comeback. Commodities like cars, houses, and furniture will be made by machine. But it is human nature to want something personalized and created--that luxury manufacture is where the jobs will be.

Zoltan Grossman writes a superb article about Ukraine, among the best I've read anywhere. The piece echos what I have written here, except that Mr. Grossman knows much more than I do. His essay has actual facts.

A regular feature of Socialist Viewpoint is Incarceration Nation. This features articles by and about prominent prisoners, including especially Mumia abu Jamal. An encounter with NYC's transit police is recited here. I think there's probably another side to the story, though I don't know what it is.

It is here where passion and reality don't mix very well. No doubt we have too many people in jail--approximately 1% of the male population. And no doubt some of them are innocent, more are mistreated, and most of them are miserable. It is a scandal. But also, a large fraction are psychopaths, including, I believe, Mumia. Perhaps not a majority, but a much higher fraction than in the general population. These people need to be in jail.

The Libertarian economist, David Henderson, writes about the Leftist author, Barbara Ehrenreich. He quotes her:

Stop all the ways that money is being taken from the poor. I mean, you can just spiral down so fast into poverty. You have a broken headlight, you get stopped. That fine is going to be greater than the cost of a new headlight. You don't have money to pay the fine, you're looking at an arrest warrant--and down you go.

Ms. Ehrenreich, Mr. Henderson, and I all agree that this is an injustice. So many piddly regulations benefit the middle class at the expense of the poor.

Nat Weinstein knew whereof we speak. His Trotskyist passion sometimes put him on the side of angels. May he rest in peace.

Further Reading:

• Labor's Final Step
• Socialist Viewpoint's Killer App
• Union Man

Take A Trotskyist To Tea

The opening sentence of Jeff Mackler's article in Socialist Action displays all the faults of Leftist thinking.

In the old days—very old days like the last Great Depression of 1929—most people understood the term “economic stimulus” to mean some form of government investment in the economy aimed at directly producing jobs for working people through various kinds of public works programs.

He actually believes that government make-work programs create jobs. They do nothing of the sort--all they do is redistribute the jobs from one place to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul does make Paul richer, but it makes Peter poorer. Taxing money away from thriving businesses to pay for corrupt, politically-inspired, welfare projects makes society poorer.

The Tea Party understands this. We believe that government is an expense, not a benefit. Prisons, police departments, firemen, welfare social workers, tax collectors, soldiers and spies all cost money. They may be a necessary expense--I wouldn't want to live in a world without policemen, public streets, or parks--but they create no wealth.

Workers create wealth when they produce quality products at affordable prices that consumers want to buy. I can buy a car from honorable people like Gregg Shotwell or Diane Feeley but I can't buy a public street, a welfare case load, or the 5th Armored Division. Accordingly, we Tea Party types are pretty sanguine about the government shutdown. In particular, if non-essential government employees are laid off, so much the better. Why are we hiring non-essential employees in the first place?

Mr. Mackler cites an example of economic progress as if it were a great evil. About the newly booming American textile industry he writes

“This wasn’t some patriotic quest,” [textile CEO] Winthrop insisted. And indeed it wasn’t. Like all capitalists his loyalty was to the dollar, not to the working class. In addition to the savings in transportation costs, the turnaround time, and other technical matters, what interested this capitalist the most was the fact that, according to the The Times, “wages aren’t that much more overseas.” 

Mr. Mackler doesn't understand that the savings are sought to compete with rivals, and therefore to lower prices for consumers. The extra money will not be pocketed as additional profit for Mr. Winthrop. Instead it makes us all richer.

When American capitalism fails to make us all richer, Mr. Mackler calls that a crisis, and perhaps rightly so. But his solution is odd--he proposes instead that we go the full North Korea. Now it is true--North Korea has no economic crises, mostly because it has no economy. Their goal, far from making everybody richer, is to maximize poverty. That's a completely different goal from that most Americans share.

David Finkel, over at Solidarity, publishes an article with an extended update entitled Is the Ship of State Headed for a Shutdown? This gets into the weeds about the shenanigans in Congress in a way that smacks of reformism. Instead of demanding the full North Korea, Mr. Finkel is simply asking that the government stay open so that people can continue to receive benefits. In other words, he's sane.

The downside of sanity is that the article no longer reads like a Trotskyist wrote it. Instead it comes across as just another Progressive point of view, very similar to what you'd read in The Nation or In These Times. It's boring. And like those journals, he takes swipes at the Tea Party.

Here are some examples:

Defunding “Obamacare” or delaying it a year (a delay which could obviously be repeated over and over) would cripple the Obama presidency beyond hope of repair. That’s precisely why the racist-fuelled Tea Party is forcing the issue, and why the Democrats cannot give in even if they’re ready to viciously slash Social Security and Medicare for decades to come.

And,

The Tea Party was largely created by a section of the ruling elite--the billionaire Koch brothers and the like--for this purpose, exploiting the paranoia and racism among white Americans as leverage against the Obama presidency.

A commenter with the handle Redchuck4 (yes, unlike other Trotskyists, Solidarity allows comments) takes issue with Mr. Finkel, remarking that

The Tea Party, while supported by political outliers in the capitalist class like the Koch brothers, is a political phenomena that is INDEPENDENT of capital. It reflects the growing racist/nativist, anti-working class hysteria of sections of the white middle class-- both professionals and managers and small business people. Again, while capital may find these yahoos useful in their battle against working people at home and abroad, the Tea Party has and is often on capital's "wrong-side."

Now I consider the accusation racist to be a slander--it's just an epithet. But lets take it seriously for a minute and see where it gets us.

All political movements are tribal to some degree. Sharing the same political platform implies speaking the same language and sharing the same culture. American whites and Blacks are different tribes and therefore belong to separate political parties. This is similar to English and French Canadians or Muslim and Hindu Indians, etc. So I can agree with Redchuck4 about the ethnic and "class" characterization of the Tea Party, though I'd probably phrase it a bit differently. But that doesn't mean that we're racist any more than the fact that 90% of Blacks vote Democratic means that they're racist.

The Tea Party is not about racial purity. Instead it is a radical Libertarian group. In the cause of Liberty, we believe in limited government and Constitutional order. Congress (and hence the federal government) deserves no more power than that delimited by the Constitution. The extension of the federal government into things like health care is very much against the spirit of the Constitution, John Roberts' messy compromise notwithstanding. In our federal system the states are sovereign, and if government has a role in health care (a separate debate), then it has to come from the states.

Though few Blacks are members of the Tea Party, those that are have played a very important role. Two of our leading theoreticians, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, are African-American. Tea Partiers have adopted Martin Luther King as one of their own (see here). And all of us thrilled to the message of Herman Cain, who used the beautiful, eloquent and musical language of his culture in the cause of Liberty. I actually contributed money to his campaign, and was sorely disappointed when he turned out to be a deeply flawed candidate. There is the more recent example of Paul McKinley.

Indeed, cultural barriers notwithstanding, African-Americans should be the strongest supporters of the Tea Party. Who has suffered more from government tyranny than they? Who benefits more from strict equality under the law? Who suffers most from absurd nanny-state regulations that make many Black occupations illegal? (E.g., it's illegal to operate a Jitney cab without a city license, or braid hair without a beautician's diploma.)

So if you believe in Liberty, join us. And then, please invite a Trotskyist out for a cup of tea.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
• Why Trotskyists Don't Like Las Vegas
• Liberals!

Labor's Giant Step Backwards

This post is about the precipitous decline of the union movement, and is based on three articles--two in this week's Militant (by Alyson Kennedy and Frank Forrestal), and the third by Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect.

Kennedy continues to report on the mineworker's pension problems, about which I blogged last week. Patriot Coal Company has declared bankruptcy and is asking to be excused from paying pensions to 10,000 retired miners (along with 13,000 dependents), when only 1600 Patriot employees are members of the United Mineworkers (UMWA). Most of the retirees never worked for Patriot--instead they were employed by Peabody Coal or Arch Coal. In that post I incorrectly implied that Peabody Coal had gone out of business. That's not true--it is alive and well, presumably as a non-union company. It has completely divested itself of Appalachian mines, operating only in the Midwest and the Rockies. The UMWA's claim is that the Patriot Coal spin-off was set up to fail from the git-go.

I don't know if that last claim is true, and in any event it doesn't matter. The Marxist (and union) conceit is that capitalists keep some large stash of cash that they could pass out to the workers if they just wanted to. It's the Scrooge McDuck image of capitalism, and it's totally false. In reality, a commodity business like coal operates on very tight margins--likely only pennies on the dollar--and that's all the money they've got to play with.

So the union tacitly acknowledges that Patriot doesn't have the resources to make good on the pension promises--that's why they're also picketing Peabody's headquarters in St. Louis. That's the primary topic of Kennedy's current article. Peabody is a somewhat larger company, with 8300 employees in both the US and Australia. Without the illusory stash of cash, the only place Peabody could get the money to pay off the union pensions is from either its customers or current employees. The customers won't bite--the coal market is shrinking. And the current employees--non-union and not from Appalachia--won't be inclined to contribute to pensions more generous than anything they themselves have been promised. From Ms. Kennedy's report, it appears that none of Peabody's current workforce is participating in these protests--why should they?

The union will lose this fight. They can't strike against a bankrupt company in a weak market--then everybody is unemployed. And they can't strike against Peabody because they don't work for Peabody. Neither unions nor companies can produce cash out of thin air--the union contracts are a fraud. The workers have been consistently lied to for decades.

Frank Forrestal's article is about the lockout of sugar workers in North Dakota. The lockout by American Crystal Sugar Company lasted 20 months, and Forrestal now reports that the workers ratified a contract  just like what they'd been offered at the beginning. In the meantime they're numbers have dwindled, and it looks as though the returning unionists will be a minority in the workforce. The union has been comprehensively defeated.

A second union conceit is that unions increase the wages of the entire working class. During the 1950s and 1960s this appeared to be true. Wages were increasing across the board, and unions just took a little bit more than their share of the extra gravy. Their wealth grew slightly faster than everybody else's, making it look like they were leading the way. But by the mid 70s productivity increases slowed down, and with it also the increase in per capita GDP. Hence there wasn't enough extra gravy to go around, and as a result the union bennies came out of everybody else's hide. People don't really mind if extra gravy gets spread out unfairly, but we hate to lose ground when the gravy runs out.

So just as the non-union miners aren't going to subsidize their colleague's pensions, neither will sugar workers or consumers subsidize union work rules. Unlike Peabody Coal of yore, American Sugar told their employees the truth--you work at market rates or you don't work at all. No false promises, and in the end everybody will be better off.

Marxists will claim that union workers are not in competition with other workers, but rather with capitalists. This simply isn't true. Capitalists cannot set wages--those are subject to the market. There is a separate market for capital, which also is determined by supply and demand (or at least should be, though the government is now artificially lowering the cost of capital). A capitalist needs to make a market return on investment in order to justify taking the money out of the bank. Capital and labor are mostly separate markets and not in competition with each other--rather like cars and avocados. Few people say "I'm not going to buy a car today because I'd rather buy an avocado."

So that brings us to Harold Meyerson's piece, entitled How Unions Are Getting Their Groove Back. In other words, Mr. Meyerson wouldn't buy a word of what I've just told you. In his view unions have turned the corner and are on the rebound. His lede paragraph:

Yesterday—April 24th--a red-letter day in the annals of worker mobilization in post-collective-bargaining America. In Chicago, hundreds of fast-food and retail employees who work in the Loop and along the Magnificent Mile called a one-day strike and demonstrated for a raise to $15-an-hour and the right to form a union. At more than 150 Wal-Mart stores across the nation, workers and community activists called on the chain to regularize employees’ work schedules. And under pressure from an AFL-CIO-backed campaign of working-class voters who primarily aren’t union members, the county supervisors of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County voted to raise the local minimum wage.

So Walmart workers are at the opposite end of the economic food chain from coal miners. Miners are in a basic resource industry, and if the world really were Wobbly-friendly, then in principle  they could shut the whole thing down. Retail workers--one step away from the consumer--have no such power. The best they can do is shut the store down. If the miners can't pull off a successful strike, then surely Walmart employees won't be able to, either.

Walmart is impossible to organize. The retail trade is so disperse and varied that shutting down one store just won't make any difference. Indeed, Walmart has clearly indicated that it will simply shut down if forced to unionize. Walmart is a labor-intensive business, unlike mining, which is capital-intensive. That means that Walmart can just walk away from the business at relatively little cost. Walmart employees know this--that's why they've never voted to unionize.

And one really has to laugh at the economic ignorance of the Bernalillo county supervisors. They think they're all powerful--by the flick of a pen they can raise the standard of living of everybody in the county. I'd like to know why they are so chintzy--why didn't they raise the minimum to $100/hour, or even $10,000/hour? I mean if it's that easy to make everybody rich, then by all means, let's go for it.

Of course it's all a fraud. The minimum wage no more increases wealth than do the fraudulent pension benefits promised union workers. Employees with defined benefit pensions--be they in the public or private sector--are victims of a huge Ponzi scheme. They will never see more than pennies on what they expect. I think that's very sad.

Anyway, kudos to The Militant for honest and informative reporting.

Further Reading:

• Collapsing Pensions
• Trouble In The Faculty Lounge
• Union Man

Collapsing Pensions

What a difference forty years makes.

When I was a Trotskyist I found articles about pensions and benefits boring. Who cares about all that stuff? I thought to my twenty-year-old self. Now I care, though I'm still afraid the topic will put my younger readers to sleep.

This post is based on three recent articles. The first, from The Militant by Alyson Kennedy, is an account of a demonstration in Charleston, WV, by United Mine Workers (UMWA) retirees surviving on a pension from the bankrupt Patriot Coal Co. The second, from Socialist Viewpoint, is by the irrepressible Gregg Shotwell and concerns Michigan's new Right To Work For Less law. And finally, is an article in today's Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler on the Pension Rate-Of-Return Fantasy.

Frankly, the retired mine workers are mostly screwed--either them or the taxpayers. Kennedy does a pretty good job in laying out the problems:

In 2007 Peabody Energy spun off most of its union mines to form Patriot Coal Corp. A year later Patriot bought Magnum Coal Co., an Arch Coal spinoff. More than 90 percent of “Patriot” retirees today never actually worked for Patriot.

Of course Patriot's first obligation is to shareholders, and not to retirees. So naturally the miners get the short end of the stick. But it gets worse:

Both the number of coal miners and the proportion who are members of the UMWA has declined dramatically over recent decades. Only about one-quarter of working miners are members of the UMWA today, down from 43 percent in 1994. Today there are about 82,000 active miners in the U.S., down from some 89,000 in January of last year and from 175,000 30 years ago.

Kennedy says that Patriot is responsible for 10,000 UMWA retirees with 13,000 dependents, many of whom suffer from black lung-related illnesses. She doesn't say that Patriot Coal Co. today employs a grand total of 4,100 people, only 1,600 of whom are in the UMWA. So Patriot is responsible for six times as many retirees as current employees--there is no way in Hades that this is going to end well.

The only bright note in Kennedy's article is

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, in a videotaped message, promised to press for the Coalfield Accountability and Retired Employee Act, which would transfer money from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund, a government fund for restoration of mined land based on taxing coal production, to the UMWA 1974 Pension Plan.

The CARE Act is supposed to prop up the union’s pension plan — which faces insolvency as a result of declining unionization and funds lost through speculative investments — as well as cover retirees who lose benefits when coal bosses file for bankruptcy and reduce taxes on employer payments to benefit plans.

Ah yes--those funds lost through "speculative investments," as if Patriot had taken the pension funds to Las Vegas for vacation. And that brings us to Kessler's article:

In June of 2012, Calpers lowered the expected rate of return on its portfolio to 7.5% from 7.75%. Mr. Milligan suggested 7.25%. Calpers had last dropped the rate in 2004, from 8.25%. But even the 7.5% return is fiction. Wall Street would laugh if the matter weren't so serious.

... 

The right number is probably 3%.

For the past 30 years the rate of return on investments has averaged about 8% annually. Pension plans have invested with that number in mind--at that rate your money doubles in about eight years. But since 2008 the rate of return is only about 3%, and doubling your money takes more than 20 years. Naturally all kinds of pension plans are now underfunded.

The common solution for this touted by the "bourgeois media" (Trotsky-talk for non-Communist newspapers) is a defined contribution plan rather than a defined benefit plan. This puts pension fund risk on the backs of the employee rather than the company, and unions tend to oppose it accordingly. After all, if the rate of return declines to 3%, that's going to affect the defined contribution plan just as much.

But I will argue that on average, employees will be better off with a defined contribution plan. There are three reasons:

1. Employees will pay more attention to their investments than some hired pension manager will. They are less likely to follow the herd. In some cases they'll make big mistakes and lose a lot of money, but in most cases they'll come out ahead. Professional managers can lose their jobs by not following the herd, even if the know the herd is wrong. They won't buck the trend.
2. My defined contribution pension plan is mostly invested in TIAA-CREF (a fund for teachers). TIAA-CREF's fiduciary responsibility is to its investors. This is different from Patriot Coal, who a) has a primary fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, and b) doesn't really know how to manage a pension plan to begin with. They're going to screw it up.
3. Defined benefit plans give everybody an incentive to lie. This is most evident for the public employee unions. The union bigwigs want to brag about their bargaining chops and will negotiate the biggest pension deal they can, even if the math makes it totally impossible. And elected politicians are always generous with taxpayers money, especially since the taxpayers won't get the bill until twenty years later. Thus both the unions and the politicians have every reason to make promises that can't possibly be kept. To a lesser extent, that's true in negotiations between the UMWA and Peabody Coal. Whoever did the negotiation for the company is long since retired (or deceased) and completely out of the loop. The workers are left out to dry. Indeed, Peabody Coal doesn't even exist anymore.

The promises in defined benefit plans are not worth the paper they're printed on. Especially in the public sector, a large number of plans are simply going to default. It looks to me like the UMWA pensions are headed in the same direction. Think Cyprus, folks.

In a slightly different vein, Mr. Shotwell writes a totally depressing article about what he calls the Right To Work For Less law in Michigan. Its real moniker is the Right To Work law, but Mr. Shotwell's addendum is accurate. Wages will go down. But wages will go down anyway. The union scale is just unaffordable, and those jobs will be either out-sourced or automated or both. 

I think Mr. Shotwell pretty much throws in the towel in this article. His purpose is to justify paying union dues in a Right-to-Work state. He can't really give a good reason. The best he comes up with is this:

A union is forged in trust and camaraderie. If a union stands for anything other than fellowship between workers, it’s probably a front for a commercial enterprise.

That's just it. All a union can provide these days is trust and camaraderie. That's something, but it won't pay the bills.

Further Reading

• Trouble in the Faculty Lounge
• Where the Customer Always Comes Last
• Union Man

Union Man

Gregg Shotwell missed his calling.

He should have been a newspaper reporter--like the kind you see in old movies, with the felt hat, pad and pencil in hand, banging on the doors of City Hall looking for corruption and incompetence. Mr. Shotwell, a man of courage, is an excellent writer. Instead, he got a job at the factory and worked building automobiles for thirty years. He founded an organization called Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS), a faction within the UAW. The Union is the cause to which Mr. Shotwell has devoted his professional life.

Mr. Shotwell writes an irregular column headed Live Bait & Ammo (LB&A). He's been writing these for years, though I don't know how many years. If there is one beef I have with him, it's that he doesn't date his columns. One can only guess when they were written.

One piece can be roughly dated to 2011, two and a half years after his retirement in 2008. LB&A #164 reads like a swan song. In it he recites his biography, enumerates the benefits of the union, and then describes how the union is failing today's workers. It is not often in this blog that I say "read the whole thing," (after all, I read The Militant so you don't have to), but now is one of those times. Gregg Shotwell's cri de coeur deserves a wide audience.

Here's the opening paragraph:

I've got it made. I’m sixty-one years old and I've been retired for two and a half years. I've got a pension, health insurance, and money in the bank. I own my own home. I’m debt free. I’m a fortunate man, but it wasn't luck or talent. I had a union.

And here is how today's workers have it:

I make more money in retirement than a new hire at General Motors.

I don’t know how they expect to make it.

They are not going to make it. They will never achieve economic security. The new generation of auto workers are not destined to enjoy the standard of living my generation took for granted. This is not a recession in the classic sense of the word, it’s a downscale restructuring. The state sponsored attack on collective bargaining is the final phase of the new New Deal.

Frankly, it is simply heartrending. Mr. Shotwell vividly describes how middle class workers are being reduced to poverty, and that nobody seems to care. His use of the phrase "downside restructuring" is apt, for that is exactly what it is. In the modern economy labor is devalued.

Republicans, especially, need to read this paragraph, which shows just how unhelpful Romney's comments about the 47% were.

When it comes to labor costs there is no bottom to the bottom line. We could work for free and the masters would complain about the cost of food, shelter, and clothing. When the mechanical cotton picker made labor obsolete in the South, workers were kicked off the land and accused of freeloading. It’s not enough for the owners to deprive workers of gainful employment, they must shame them in the bargain. We hear the same refrain today in legislatures where unemployment benefits are cut as free trade agreements make labor obsolete and skilled trades redundant. When capital rules the land, mercy is arbitrary and retribution is absolute.

So what is the cause of this sorry state of affairs? Here Mr. Shotwell and I part company. He has absorbed enough Marxist balderdash to assume that greedy capitalists, whose primary source of profit is to squeeze more from the workers, are to blame. And then there is the UAW President, Bob King, who in Mr. Shotwell's reading is a co-conspirator with the class enemy. Mr. King, rather than stand up for workers' rights, heads what is bitingly called the "concession caucus," i.e., that group that wants a contract with the manufacturers no matter what the cost to the rank and file.

But neither Mr. King nor the greedy capitalists are at fault for the plight of today's autoworkers. Instead, the culprit is none other than me. And you, too. We, the consumers, are the real villains of the case, for we inevitably buy the best products available at the lowest possible prices. I have no hard data, but I think cars have gotten cheaper over the decades--at least as a fraction of annual income.

And while I can't vouch for a lower price, I can say without a doubt that vehicles are vastly better than they were in 1979, when Mr. Shotwell got his first auto job. This is so obvious that I don't think I need to waste words making the case. The automobile industry over the past thirty years has substantially improved my standard of living.

So better cars at lower prices--is this bad? Not for you and me, but it is bad for autoworkers. They are now forced into a competition to be the lowest cost, highest quality producer. Failing that, they simply go out of business. Mr. King understands this. He may not like it any more than Mr. Shotwell does, but it is an inexorable truth of the laws of economics. There is simply no way that today's autoworkers can have the same standard of living for which Mr. Shotwell is so grateful.

Mr. Shotwell is not the only person in his predicament. I share his sense of undeserved entitlement. I'm a professor at a state college--tenured and not too far from retirement. I can't be fired or even laid off, especially since I'm the senior person in my department. I have "rights" accorded to me by the public employee union, including cushy working conditions, generous health care, a sweet pension, "academic freedom," a nice office with a beautiful view, and so on. All of this is at tuition and taxpayer expense, and little of it is deserved.

But just as the mechanical cotton picker pushed the sharecropper off the land, and just as the robot has eliminated a large fraction of factory employment, so also will automation displace college professors. I feel very sorry for my younger colleagues. They are chasing tenure as if it meant a 30-year career like mine. It means nothing of the sort, for they, too, are going to be rendered obsolete and will be tossed to the wayside like so many useless autoworkers.

Mr. Shotwell has no solutions for these problems. A stronger union will accomplish nothing. I confess I have no solutions, either, but somehow I'm more optimistic. That's probably why I'm a Republican.

Still, I like Gregg Shotwell. I wish him a long, happy, healthy, and pleasant retirement. And keep writing, sir. Please keep writing.