Something mighty stinky happened during the great bailout bonanza of '08. Seeing the tsunami of free money being lavished on the banksters, the CEOs of GM and Chrysler suddenly discovered that they too were too big to fail etc. They polished up their begging cups and pointed their corporate jets Washington way.
The fallout from their successful foray to the capital included a two-tiered wage structure. The UAW old boys would keep their decent white folk wages. New hires would get Mexican wages, even if they weren't Mexican. So you've got one guy on the assembly line making 60 thousand a year, and the new guy next to him, doing the same work, making 25 a year. How and why the UAW ever went for this I'll never understand.
Sergio Marchionne, big cheese at Chrysler, wants to change that. "When you've got this kind of economic disparity between people on the line, it's not something that can go on for a long period of time" he says.
Indeed.
And this must be great news for the new hires. Obviously Marchionne plans to bring their wages up to parity with the old boys. I'm sure of it.
What else could he do?
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