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. The 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.
--Dean Baker
