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Do You Hate Unions and Working Class People? You Can Write for the Washington Post.

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Hannah Bell Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 11:00 AM
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Do You Hate Unions and Working Class People? You Can Write for the Washington Post.
No Knowledge Necessary!

The Washington Post showed yet again why it is known as "Fox on 15th Street." It ran a column today that blamed the United Auto Workers for the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM. So what if Toyota has managed to profitably run a plant in California represented by the UAW for more than two decades? So what if wages of unionized autoworkers in profitable car companies in Europe and Japan are the same or higher than in the United States? So what if the proximate cause of the bankruptcy was incompetent economic management in Washington and an explosion of incompetence and greed on Wall Street?

At the Washington Post, the line is blame the unionized auto workers -- after all, they earn $57,000 a year. Except of course by the calculation in this column. Richard K. Bank, a man with no obvious qualification other than his dislike of unions told Post readers that the G.M., Ford, and Chrysler have labor costs of close to $110 an hour. That would come to $220,000 a year for a full-time worker. Of course, this has no basis in reality, but it helps advance the anti-union case, so it's good enough to get in the Washington Post.

http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press

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BolivarianHero Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 11:02 AM
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1. Meh...
Edited on Mon Jun-01-09 11:02 AM by BolivarianHero
It starts at the top. From the CEO down, managers in Europe and Japan tend to be more concerned with establishing accountability and competence from the top down than with living the pampered lives of chuckling robber barons.
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blindpig Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 12:27 PM
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4. To be honest, it starts with the stockholders. n/t
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Captain Hilts Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 11:25 AM
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2. A huge percentage of the WP's political writers went to Harvard and Yale, where unions don't mean
Edited on Mon Jun-01-09 11:26 AM by Captain Hilts
a whole lot to the students.

And it's funny how unions - and not the healthcare 'industry' - are being blamed for skyrocketing healthcare costs for employees and retirees.
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Blue_Tires Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 12:23 PM
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3. well, to be honest, i have yet to see a business writer at any U.S. paper
take a pro-labor stance...even some writers in Detroit are guilty of this...
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onenote Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-01-09 12:33 PM
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5. hyperbole much?
Yeah, Robert Samuelson wrote a column that was critical of unions. He's a regular columnist for the post and that's his particular viewpoint.

Another regular columnist for the Post, Harold Meyerson, often writes from a pro-union perspective.
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