Global Forces Squeeze Pay and Benefits
Workers at auto parts maker Delphi Corp. will be asked this week to take a two-thirds pay cut. It's one of the most drastic wage concessions ever sought from unionized employees.

Workers at General Motors Corp., meanwhile, tentatively agreed on Monday to absorb billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler employees are certain to face similar demands.

The forces affecting Delphi and GM workers are extreme versions of what's occurring across the American labor market, where such economic risks as unemployment and health costs once broadly shared by business and government are being shifted directly onto the backs of American working families. 

Four years into an economic recovery, workers across America should be riding high. Instead, they're facing new demands to surrender hard-won benefits and agree to wage concessions. Jerry Jasinowski, president of the Manufacturing Institute at the National Assn. of Manufacturers, said such givebacks would simply become a fact of life.

The auto industry has been a weather vane for wage trends almost since it began. Henry Ford's 1914 announcement of the Five Dollar Day, doubling at once the pay packages of his 15,000 assembly line workers, inaugurated what the Detroit Free Press called a "new industrial era."

The labor historians offering the bleakest outlook say they don't know what will arrest this downward process.

"There used to be a kind of floor for worker welfare," said Leon Fink, editor of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. "But we're now living in an age in which all those old standards have come unglued."
Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2005