Tag: General Motors (GM)

The Conspiracy Line

 

By the 1960s, of the hundreds of streetcar lines that had once been a primary mode of transportation in cities and suburbs across the United States in the first half of the 20th century, only a small fraction still operated, and usually only in city centers. Competition from automobiles and buses was one cause for declining ridership of streetcars, and supposedly the costs of installing and maintaining lines was higher than costs associated with infrastructure for cars and buses. The history of what happened in the major mid-century makeover of American urban mass transit is muddled, and one explanation for it that keeps popping up has to do with the machinations of the automobile manufacturers, chiefly General Motors (GM).

 

The idea springs from how GM bought out streetcar lines around the country, and then dismantled the lines, junked the streetcars, and signed city governments to contracts for purchase and ongoing use of the buses GM manufactured. GM also sold cars to urban and suburban commuters who found themselves with fewer alternatives than they had before the 1920s, when the streetcar lines were still thriving. That’s a neat story, and it certainly fits in with the behavior we have come to expect of large corporations and the executives who run them, but in this case it turns out to be a little too neat and only partially true.

Purchase Street, New Bedford, Mass (68412)
A postcard circa 1930-1945 depicts Purchase Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Photo from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection.

Market forces generated by consumer preferences played the greatest part in the decline of ridership on streetcar lines starting in the 1920s and accelerating through the next quarter century. The streetcar lines were privately owned and the companies bore the costs of maintaining the tracks they operated on and other infrastructure costs, even though they used the same publicly maintained roads as buses and cars. The streetcar lines were more and more at a competitive disadvantage as public money benefited those other modes of transportation and as consumers came to prefer the relative freedom of driving their own cars or taking buses that weren’t restricted to tracks.

Comforting as it might be to blame the automobile and gasoline industries for ripping up streetcar tracks around the nation, depriving commuters of a useful commuting option, the truth in this case is that the public shoulders the greater responsibility. Individual consumers operating in their own self-interest took advantage of cheap gasoline and publicly financed road building, such as the interstate highway system started in the 1950s, to buy at least one car for every household. In most cities, taxpayers balked at public ownership of the streetcar lines, a move which would have saved many of the lines from the corporate scavenging that ultimately killed them off. In other words, GM and other auto and gas corporate interests didn’t precipitate the demise of the streetcar lines, but neither did they mourn their loss, and ultimately, of course, GM and the others profited greatly from the makeover of the American transportation system.

By the time of the 1959 release of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the streets of Manhattan were dominated by vehicular traffic, and mass transit options for New Yorkers were limited to subways and buses. Bernard Herrmann composed the music for the film, and Saul Bass designed the titles. The director makes his cameo appearance at the end of the title sequence.

More than a half century after streetcars were all but wiped off the map in America, they are coming back in spots like Brooklyn, driven by the desire of some people to get around town without the hassles of car ownership, the pollution of cars and buses, the blight of enormous parking lots, and the swallowing up of green spaces for more roads to alleviate the congestion on existing roads, only to have the new roads fill up as well. Streetcars powered by electricity generate pollution at a remove, to be sure, but as more power plants use renewable energy sources, that problem should lessen. Meanwhile, building out more mass transit infrastructure should take off the road some of the oversized vehicles too many Americans appear to love, and which the automobile makers and the fossil fuel industry love turning out for them since they are highly profitable. It has taken a century for Americans to learn anew the value of mass transit options like streetcars, and perhaps soon, before we reach the end of the line, gridlock on the roads will clear, and so will the air everywhere.
— Vita

 

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All Honest Work Has Dignity

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” ― President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933.

 

Ms. magazine Cover - Fall 2013
Ms. magazine cover – Fall 2013. Cover by Liberty Media for Women, LLC.

 

Whether a person works at a computer in an office or scrubs floors in an office building, all honest work has dignity and deserves respect and the worker deserves a just, living wage. This concept, noted in ethical and religious teachings throughout history, and codified in legal and humanitarian documents in the United States and other countries, has been honored more in the breach lately because of growing income inequality which exalts the obscenely overpaid executive over the line worker on whose back the executive rides. The Fight for $15 movement has shaken up the situation over the past few years, but in the current political climate it appears that raising the minimum wage to a living wage will be left entirely up to the states. It’s similar to the situation of addressing human-induced climate change or greed-induced health care reform, where the federal government is paralyzed by ideologues and corporate shills, and if meaningful action is to be taken at all it has to be taken by the states.

It was in the 1980s that we first started to see many adults, and even some retirees, working in fast food joints on the line, rather than just in management. At the time it was jarring to see the retirees working in that environment, wearing the hideous uniforms and taking orders from people less than half their age. We have since gotten used to the sight as another token of the diminished expectations of the new service economy. The statistics on fast food workers show the average age has increased to 29, up from the 1950s and 1960s when the majority of workers were indeed teenagers. Nevertheless the perception clings of awkward youths working behind the counter temporarily for spending money while they lived with their parents before moving on to maturity in the pursuit of a higher wage American Dream. Nowhere is there a mention in law or religion that a worker’s wages are an unimportant, trifling matter because they are not needed for basic support, but that is the justification service sector companies, and fast food companies particularly, use to explain why they pay a majority of their workers the stingy federally mandated minimum wage, or a tiny bit more.

Fast food workers on strike for higher minimum wage and better benefits (26162729410)
Fast food workers on strike for higher minimum wage and better benefits. Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 14, 2016. Photo by Flickr user Fibonacci Blue.

Charles Wilson at GM
Charles Wilson at GM, 1948. Wilson was the head of General Motors from 1941 to 1953, when President Eisenhower selected him to be Secretary of Defense, a post in which he served until 1957. In 1950, at the height of American economic power, Wilson was the highest paid chief executive in the country at $586,100, or about $5.6 million in modern terms. He paid 73 percent of that income in taxes – $430,350. General Motors in 1950 was a major driver of American prosperity, and its workforce was highly unionized.

What might have been a fair wage for a teenager in the 1950s and 1960s, one who was decidedly uninterested in joining a collective action to seek a higher wage for his or her temporary job, is not a fair wage for an adult supporting an adult’s responsibilities over the long term in 2017. If fast food executives are going to engage in moral relativism regarding the wage scale for their workers, then they need to apply it even after the demographics have changed and no longer work in their favor. They also need to explain how it is they can’t afford to pay their workers more, yet they can pay the typical CEO at a rate 1,200 times that of the average worker, a rate which outstrips the ballooning income inequality throughout the rest of the American economy. It wasn’t like that back in the Good Old Days, back when America was Great. But of course they haven’t addressed those questions. Instead they’ve claimed they’ll have to raise prices, which will drive away customers, which will cause them to drop workers and turn to automation where possible. Is it honest, dignified work then to cheat your employees, to cut corners on your customers, to chisel on your taxes, all so that you can present an attractive financial statement to your shareholders and stuff your own already overflowing pockets with more money?
― Ed.

 

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Pick Your Poison

Americans’ distaste for the two major party candidates for president has never been greater than it has been this election year. When Americans vote on November 8, most of them will likely cast their ballot in the spirit of voting for the lesser of two evils, while a few others will vote for a third party candidate. When both major party candidates are highly disliked even by members of their own parties, justifying a vote for the lesser of two evils requires more mental and moral gymnastics than ever before. The arguments for and against voting third party, meanwhile, are the same as always.

David - The Death of Socrates
“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David

Too many of us tend to think of politics as something we need pay attention to once every four years, and then we act surprised at the choices presented to us by the more politically active. Anyone paying attention to politics more often than once every four years should not be surprised at the rightward drift of the Democratic Party over the past generation to the point that a mainstream Democratic candidate now holds positions that thirty years ago we would have attributed to a moderate Republican. The Republican Party has steadily marginalized its moderate members, but until this year its establishment has managed at least for each presidential election to put forward a candidate acceptable to its conservative, but not radical, elite. This year at last the trends of the past generation have culminated in both parties nominating for president the candidates they have long worked toward presenting to the country, and therefore no one should be surprised.

Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (A wide-angle view of marchers along the mall, showing the Reflecting Pool and... - NARA - 542045
1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.

In a democracy, so the saying goes, people get the government – or political candidates – they deserve. That seems like an awfully cynical assessment this year. We can’t pick and choose the times we would like to take responsibility for who we put forward for elective office, however, and so perhaps it would serve us better to pay closer attention to politics during the intervals between presidential elections. If we did that, then maybe we could take back this democratic republic from the corporate oligarchy which has steadily, year by year, day by day, stolen it from the people who are expected to trot out to the polls every so often and sign off on one side or the other of the same coin, the one that says on one side “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” and on the other “Corporations are people.”
– Ed.

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