Nolan Finley at The Detroit News reports:
Workers in Barack Obama’s new economic order fall into two categories — those who are worthy of the president’s energies, and those who aren’t. You may be surprised to learn where you rank.
Obama doesn’t weigh the value of workers based on their paychecks, what they do or whether they slip their feet into wingtips or steel-toed boots in the morning. His sole interest is in whether they have a union card in their wallet.
If they do, the president is in their corner, working hard to make sure they don’t get the short end of any stick. But if they are among the 88 percent of American workers who don’t belong to a union? Ask Delphi’s salaried employees what Obama thinks of them.
As part of Delphi’s restructuring in bankruptcy court, the Troy-based auto parts maker dumped its pension plan onto the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.
That usually means a continued pension check, but one that is much smaller. And for Delphi’s salaried workers, that’s what they can expect.
Delphi’s union-represented workers, however, will dodge that bullet. The Obama administration swooped in and, in an extraordinary deal, is forcing General Motors to make the 46,000 union workers and retirees whole. GM used to own Delphi, and relies on the supplier for much of its parts.
“The U.S. government is taking care of a select group of people and tossing the rest of us under the bus,” Peter Beiter, a retired financial manager for a Delphi plant in Rochester, N.Y., told the New York Times.
And it’s doing so with the tax dollars of those like Beiter who aren’t in the favored class of workers. GM is operating with more than $50 billion in government bailout money.
The Obama administration already undermined the rule of law by ignoring bankruptcy law to give Chrysler to the United Auto Workers union. Now they are again rewarding union workers at the expense of average Americans.
Sacrificing the rule of law and economic freedom to big labor power will only kill, not create jobs.
