Electablog comments on an interview that Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr gave to the Wall Street Journal.
Orr said that the union workers who built the city’s great manufacturing base were “dumb, lazy, happy, and rich.”
This, apparently, is what he thinks caused the ruination of Detroit: All those dumb, rich working stiffs in unions.
Nothing about those dumb, rich executives who sat on their fat salaries while Japan designed a better, more fuel-efficient car.
Nothing about the happy, rich corporate executives who outsourced basic industries to low-wage countries.
Electablog says:
“What Mr. Orr seems to forget is that it was the rise of the manufacturing industry in the United States along with the labor unions that created the middle class. The men and women he degrades with this callous statement worked hard every day in the factories that built things in this country. To describe them as dumb, lazy, and rich is beyond absurd and is incredibly insulting. Detroit’s problems don’t stem from union workers being able to make a decent wage with benefits and a pension. This country is strong, both economically and socially, because workers had enough money in their pockets to buy the things they were building.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The wheels that squeak like hell …
The wheels that carry the load …
Choose wisely, Greasehopper …
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What a disgusting load of rubbish. Has he ever done factory work?
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I did a stint of a few weeks one summer in a right-to-work state when I was a teenager. I was in an almost constant state of terror about the possibility that I might lose a limb. And there may be another type of job with a more relentless workflow, but I can’t think of one offhand.
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“Nothing about those dumb, rich executives who sat on their fat salaries while Japan designed a better, more fuel-efficient car.”
A great line.
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True enough, as far as it goes, but the dumb, rich executives imprudently succumbed when times were good, to unsustainable union contracts that killed them when sales went down. It was the unions who drove everything.
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Excellent post.
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Actually, that is not what he said. His comments clearly were aimed at the elites, including the auto industry magnates, who ran the city of Detroit.
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And let me tell you how “dumb” the Detroit public school system was. A woman posting on Pinterest (no less) discovered that as she looked for images of children and gardening, she found them in the Detroit Public Schools! Yes, those “lazy” citizens had enough wisdom to erect greenhouses in 1/3 of their school sites where students learned to grow fresh, healthy, nutritious fruits and veggies. Honestly! Mr. Orr must have had a starring role in the movie, “Idiocracy” and include the WSJ for being complicit enough to publish his propaganda.
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And nothing about how the financial industry plundered Detroit, and municipal governments more generally. And nothing about the corporate subsidies and tax cuts being lavished on Michigan’s corporations and wealthy — a much higher total than the amount of pension under-funding, assuming that Orr hasn’t intentionally inflated that total.
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“because workers had enough money in their pockets to buy the things they were building”
precisely
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Nothing about corporations not paying their taxes
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I agree with Funkhouser, and not just because I like typing “Funkhouser.” Orr was obviously trying, badly, to attribute these qualities to the city of Detroit (or arguably the captains of its industry), not union workers. On the other hand, the metaphor essentially asserts that Detroit’s union workers are the product of the the city’s happy stupor, so I’m not sure the distinction is that much less offensive.
There are some instructive takeaways in the WSJ interview, though.
First, spherical cities will fail. “Due to a failure to adapt, ‘we lost our edge,’ and not just to the U.S.’s global competitors, but to challengers in the South like Atlanta, Chattanooga and Dallas.”
Second, what was Atlanta 50 years ago? “Atlanta was a small city that had a bakery.'”
Third, thinking must be nimble and agile, and someone must speak leadership while someone else listens to leadership. Or thinking and leadership must each be nimble, agile, spoken, and listened to. (“But as it became increasingly clear this promise was unrealistic, ‘[T]here needed to be some very nimble and agile thinking and leadership that was listened to,’ he adds. ‘There was nimble and agile thinking and leadership that was spoken—but nobody listened.'”)
Fourth, it’s all about creating the right ambience, and maybe also a little about being the seat of government or the financial capital of the world, but mainly it’s all about ambience. “Other major cities, like Washington, D.C., and New York, that had fallen into disrepair were revived slowly by neighborhoods blossoming and expanding. The challenge will be to create the atmosphere and ingredients that can nurture this growth.”
There’s more, including stuff about how there’s a company in Detroit with a foosball table.
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OK. There seems to be debate here about what the WSJ article says. Here’s the relevant passagee:
“Much of Detroit’s dysfunction is also due to simple complacency. ‘For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy and rich,’ he explains. ‘Detroit has been the center of more change in the 20th century than I dare say virtually any other city, but that wealth allowed us to have a covenant [that held] if you had an eighth grade education, you’ll get 30 years of a good job and a pension and great health care, but you don’t have to worry about what’s going to come.’
“But as it became increasingly clear this promise was unrealistic.”
It might be, of course, that the “dumb, lazy, happy and rich” comment was directed at the city’s elites and that it was the editing of the passage by the author of the article that creates the implication that Orr’s comment was directed at union workers. That would be the most charitable reading of the passage. However, Orr’s comments do suggest that he thinks that the situation of workers in Detroit’s heyday–being able to have a dependable job for 30 years, with a pension and great health care– was not sustainable. And this raises some obvious questions: Does he think that the situation that should prevail is that workers should NOT have dependable jobs, pensions, and great health care–that that’s not a future we can reasonable aspire to? What, then, should we aspire to? Jobs that are not dependable? No pensions? Terrible health care?
The most charitable reading of these comments would be that he meant that people with only eighth-grade educations cannot now have such aspirations. But that’s not said in the article. Instead, the article sounds like run-of-the-mill right-wing union bashing, like “We got into this mess because people at the bottom of the social ladder demanded and got too much.” And that’s a popular refrain these days. It’s common, for example, to blame the housing debacle that triggered the recent recession on poor people who had the audacity to aspire to home ownership.
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Sorry. Correcting some typos in that post:
OK. There seems to be debate here about what the WSJ article says. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Much of Detroit’s dysfunction is also due to simple complacency. ‘For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy and rich,’ he explains. ‘Detroit has been the center of more change in the 20th century than I dare say virtually any other city, but that wealth allowed us to have a covenant [that held] if you had an eighth grade education, you’ll get 30 years of a good job and a pension and great health care, but you don’t have to worry about what’s going to come.’
“But as it became increasingly clear this promise was unrealistic.”
It might be, of course, that the “dumb, lazy, happy and rich” comment was directed at the city’s elites and that it was the editing of the passage by the author of the article that creates the implication that Orr’s comment was directed at union workers. That would be the most charitable reading of the passage. However, Orr’s comments do suggest that he thinks that the situation of workers in Detroit’s heyday–being able to have a dependable job for 30 years, with a pension and great health care– was not sustainable. And this raises some obvious questions: Does he think that the situation that should prevail is that workers should NOT have dependable jobs, pensions, and great health care–that that’s not a future we can reasonably aspire to? What, then, should we aspire to? Jobs that are not dependable? No pensions? Terrible health care?
The most charitable reading of these comments would be that he meant that people with only eighth-grade educations cannot now have such aspirations. But that’s not said in the article. Instead, the article sounds like run-of-the-mill right-wing union bashing, like “We got into this mess because people at the bottom of the social ladder demanded and got too much.” And that’s a popular refrain these days. It’s common, for example, to blame the housing debacle that triggered the recent recession on poor people who had the audacity to aspire to home ownership.
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There’s no question that he wasn’t describing “union workers.” Like I wrote above, that doesn’t mean that what he did say wasn’t insulting to Detroit’s “union workers.” But he clearly wasn’t calling “union workers” lazy or stupid or rich (or happy!). So as far as I’m concerned, Electablog either is not a careful reader or doesn’t mind misleading readers if that’s what it takes to deliver a good zinger. It’s sloppy at best and unethical at worst. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of other lines of attack, both frivolous and more substantive.
But we know what Orr was trying to do, right? He’s just parroting the gibberish that business consultants use when they’re hired to tell failing businesses why they’re failing. The number 1 reason why any once-dominant business lost its position of dominance is “it got complacent.” When you get complacent, you’re vulnerable to “disruptive technologies.” It’s just a bunch of words that people string together so they look like they have something to say. Pick up a copy of Fast Company magazine (and a vomit bag to play it safe) and read all about it.
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Well said, FLERP!
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Just for comparison, from forbes.com, 2011: “In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
So the average German right winger is not saying that unions destroyed their car industry as they do in the US.
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The statistical process control movement to improve quality was INVENTED here in the US by pioneers like Walter Shewart, W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph Juran. They tried to sell Detroit car company execs on the idea, but they knew that they weren’t really in the car business that they were in the business of selling parts for cars that broke down. So, they took their ideas to Germany and Japan. The rest is history.
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The workers councils is an extremely important element. In both Germany and Japan, managers and employees also work together on matters involving continual quality improvement. A worker who can stop his or her line when the level of defects is unacceptable to him or her is a worker who gives a damn. Take away worker autonomy and you take away emotional investment and create alienation, which in turn leads to terrible productivity and products.
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From Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive (that’s the big union in Germany): “against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.” Meanwhile in the US, unions are constantly demonized, slimed, swift-boated and blamed for the failures of the CEOs, hedge fund managers and corporate oligarchs. There’s a constant well funded and well orchestrated war against unions in the US.
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Yes, and its name is ALEC. See you tomorrow at the Palmer House in downtown Chicago!
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Bring comfortable clothes in case you get arrested-ha ha! Go get em!
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Good luck!
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In a capital-intensive industry like auto, labor costs, both direct and indirect, constitute roughly 10% of the final product’s cost.
According to the UAW – and for those who automatically question union-supplied statistics, go ahead and raise the estimate by 50% – the total labor (health, pension, overtime, shift differetials, etc.) costs of a union-made auto average 8.4 %. (www.uaw.org/page/wages-and-labor-costs).
Thus, even when granting this purported slander of fat, rich, complacent union workers, their living standards had nothing whatsoever to do with the decline of auto manufacturing or Detroit.
What union living standards did have something to do with was acting as a break upon the excess profits of a notoriously badly managed industry. In the eyes of the Overclass, that clearly had to change, and it largely has.
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Orr is Snyder’s paid puppet. The man is not a Detroiter and has been appointed by a man who ignored the will of Michigan’s voters who voted “no” to EMs. Snyder and the legislature did not listen. Now, Orr and his team get paid tons while they work on destroying the rights of regular workers. More attacks on regular working people. What do they expect people to work for? 2 cents an hour?
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For another comparison, our neighbor to the north has a unionization rate of about 31% as compared to the US rate of 11.3%. Many US industries (auto plants included) do locate plants in Canada and somehow can manage to accommodate themselves to the Canadian unions. For whatever reason, there is not rabid anti-unionism in Canada, there is not a war on unions. Having a political party (the GOP) that is dedicated to wiping out all unions is a major difference between Canada and the US. Canada has more than twice our unionization rate and yet they navigated the great recession much better than we did and with fewer ill effects. In the US, we have the blame the union syndrome and knee jerk reaction. According to the right wing script, most of our problems can be blamed on unions, those evil unions. Canada does not have the equivalent of right to work states, right to work provinces do not exist in Canada.
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From a time that Detroit was “dumb, lazy and rich”:
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Dang, wrong paste.
Trying again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GPw8Q5WBxQ
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Dumb, lazy and rich is a gross mischaracterization. But why is it a bad thing for workers to be happy? Don’t they want happy workers?
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Mr. Orr reflects the indoctrination that many insulated, white, privileged people such as he believe. They think that since they are comfortable that anyone who isn’t is lazy and since they are practically all white they can easily conflate skin color and morality. It is difficult for him and his class to look at working people especially working people of color and see us as worthy and as human as they are. This mindset allows him and other (but not all) wealthy white people to easily blame us and to ignore that deferred compensation for the executives is the same as pensions (deferred compensation) for workers, that health care for those in the plush offices is as necessary for workers and their families.
Oh wait, you say Orr is black!!! I guess some people will even become cannibals if the price is right.
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Indeed: the likes of Orr, Obama and Booker are proof of that.
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