The GM strike says much about the wide gap between the affluent and the rest of us.

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Massive Inequality is Unexamined Fault Line Behind GM Walk-Out

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted October 2, 2007.

The brief national strike against America's biggest automaker has a good bit to tell us about the gap that divides the awesomely affluent in the United States from everyone else.



No one expected last week's United Auto Workers strike against General Motors -- the first national walkout against GM since 1970 -- to last long. And no one is expecting the problems that prompted the walkout to end any time soon either.

Perhaps the most basic problem of all: Trade unions in America's private sector no longer have the clout that's needed to make sure the wealth working Americans create gets shared, not concentrated.

Only 7.4 percent of private sector workers in the United States currently belong to unions, about one-fifth the labor market presence the labor movement held a half-century ago. In the auto industry, once American labor's cutting-edge bastion, less than 23 percent of workers now hold union cards.

What difference does this make?

Back in the mid twentieth century, organized auto workers -- and the American labor movement as a whole -- didn't just successfully battle to improve the wages, hours, and working conditions of average Americans. Unions back then, and particularly the UAW, also helped cut America's rich down to a more democratic size.

In 1942, for instance, UAW urgings helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to call for a 100 percent tax -- the equivalent of a maximum wage" -- on individual income over $25,000, about $330,000 in today's dollars. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/64072/