Uptown Notes

The Automaker “bailout” remains a hot topic and the conversation about it on the web and in the mainstream press are interesting. I’ve tweeted about my frustrations with Big business’ insistence that worker wages were the reasons for the Big Three’s failures. I’ve seen some good conversations and writing in the blogosphere about it, but these haven’t trickled through the media monopolies to mainstream sources. The NY Time finally broke down the “cooked” 73 dollars an hour figure toted out by anti-labor advocates. It’s nice to have some reality injected into this political and polemical debate!

Here are some excerpts:

So what is the reality behind the number? Detroit’s defenders are right that the number is basically wrong. Big Three workers aren’t making anything close to $73 an hour (which would translate to about $150,000 a year).

And yet the main problem facing Detroit, overwhelmingly, is not the pay gap. That’s unfortunate because fixing the pay gap would be fairly straightforward.

The real problem is that many people don’t want to buy the cars that Detroit makes. Fixing this problem won’t be nearly so easy.