Word: blue-collared
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...white- and blue-collar workers alike, shifting to shorter working hours and lower pay in exchange for tacit job guarantees is suddenly a no-brainer - not just in Britain, but also in Taiwan, Iceland and a swathe of other countries in Europe and Asia. Other schemes being tried include temporary work suspensions at factories, and even work-sharing programs. Two countries stand out as having the most developed and systematic approach: Japan and Germany, which both provide government subsidies to companies who keep on workers even though there's little or no work for them to do. Both have recently...
...block V8 engines, turning a sporty 4-seat roadster into a street monster and track regular. Mustang had the name; but Camaro had the horses. Like many of Detroit's muscle cars, though, Camaro was doomed by paunchier styling and performance over the years, and the car's blue-collar fans drifted away to pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. Slow sales doomed...
...problem the incoming Obama administration will face is an uptick in union militancy. Blue-collar workers went into December fearing GM and Chrysler might collapse but left angry that Republican demands for wage concessions came at a time when bankers were using federal bailout money for bonuses. "I don't make $74 per hour," says Bryan Larkin, who is employed at GM's truck plant in Pontiac, Mich...
...expected to give up the controversial jobs bank and approve a change in funding the VEBA trust that is supposed to take over paying for health-care of blue-collar retirees in January, 2010. The $7 billion contribution GM owes its VEBA could be postponed indefinitely, according to Sean McAlinden, vice president of the Center For Automotive Research in Ann Arbor...
From the union's perspective, the health-care benefits always represented deferred wages, says Jerry Tucker, a former member of the UAW board. In addition, as GM, Ford and Chrysler have cut their blue-collar payrolls in half, from 300,000 to 150,000, over the past three years, the health-care benefits have become more important, he says. "More than two-thirds of workers taking early retirement aren't eligible for Medicare. A lot of them didn't even want to retire," he says. UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said in the fall of 2007 that the VEBA trusts would...