How Dignified Work Was Run Into a Ditch

I'm often chided for my passionate support of the domestic automobile industry. But I don't mind the ribbing.

My passion is a product of my faith in America, my belief in its ability to compete and excel, to innovate, to lead.

There is something else -- gratitude . . . and the desire to save an industry that put so many of my people on the road to prosperity.

I am a black child of the Deep South who watched legions of neighbors and relatives flee economic apartheid in pursuit of opportunity in the automobile factories of Michigan and Ohio and in the steel plants of Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Those black men and women often were assigned the dirtiest, most dangerous, least desirable jobs in those factories. But if whites happened to be working alongside them, they tended to be paid equally for the same tasks. There was hope for the future in that treatment, a quantum of dignity.

That hope and dignity eventually became codified in contracts between the car companies and the United Auto Workers union, as it did between other manufacturing entities and their labor organizations.

But, alas, hope and dignity were corrupted by greed on both sides -- on the part of unions that always wanted more, and on the part of domestic car companies, which became more interested in building Wall Street portfolios than they were in turning out cars and trucks of superior quality.

People make mistakes. But redemption is found in the good that they do, and the domestic automobile industry has done a lot of tangible good for this nation.

The American Three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler -- largely have been responsible for the development of a black middle class in this country. Many children of factory workers followed their parents onto automobile assembly lines. But many others went to colleges and universities, medical and technical schools, thanks to good UAW salaries and educational benefits.

Think about that:

People who left the South as field hands to become factory hands spawned generations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, technicians, engineers, inventors, designers, scientists, politicians -- and more than a few journalists. A country without a viable manufacturing infrastructure, a nation lacking a commitment to excellence and innovation in manufacturing could not have authored such progress.

But things now have gone sadly amiss; and we're all to blame because of our incessant push for more without sacrifice.