The Snakes Of Wrath

BustEverything
RacingAlongTheBottomVille


If you were to believe those with the reptilian smiles running the Ford Motor Company these days you might think that the layoffs and forced buyouts are all about a 'repositioning' of their brand in the marketplace.

But if you were to gaze past the gleaming teeth, you might just be able to see the second coming of Steinbeck's Okies just over the horizon.

Except these days it's not the desperate workforce that migrates.

Instead, it is the plants themselves that move, from union shops in the North to non-union ones in the south.

Which, of course, is bizarre when you think about it.

After all Henry Ford was the guy who wanted his workers to make enough to actually buy the stuff they were making.

But, then again, by all accounts it appears that Mr. Ford's skin bore little sign of the slime or the scales that mark the epidermis of the current genus and species that is running amok in today's gilded multinational cages.

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Update Sept 19/06: Cliff, in the comments, takes me to task, for giving Mr. Ford too much credit, especially in the last paragraph above. And while I threw Ford into the mix only for comparative purposes only, particularly with respect to how Ford initially decided it was actually a good thing to not treat workers like crap, Cliff makes a very good point, particularly with respect to Ford's later virulent anti-unionism, which is described in some detail here.

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