Harley Shaiken Wage Quotations

Miller has clearly chosen bankruptcy over collective bargaining to restructure the company. Delphi is using a bankruptcy judge to begin moving in the direction of Chinese wages and benefits.

Bankruptcy is allowing airlines to emerge with a clean slate, but it's bad news for workers. Pensions will be affected, and it will mean lower wages and probably fewer jobs.

I think this case is, in fact, a watershed. I think what it does is -- in the most dramatic way we've seen to date -- it introduces the wages of the global economy into Main Street in Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere,

Delphi has essentially said: 'We need competitive wages.' Those wages currently are being set in China, not Flint, (Michigan).

If you cut wages by two-thirds, that creates a class of people that can't afford to go to Wal-Marts. If other industries do this, America will have a far smaller middle class, and the whole economy in the 21st Century begins to unravel.

The pain and surprise may come when Delphi wages are cut and it sets a pattern of pressing down on wages to succeed competitively, ... It reverses the success story of the American economy, which has always been that U.S. firms paid the most.