From: Jasper
Date: 17 May 2000
Time: 14:00:48
Jean,
The name of the game is, divide and conquer. When slavery was officially outlawed in the United States few people noticed that the sharecropping system in the South and the Company Store system in the North effectively replaced it with poor blacks and poor whites trapped in similar circumstances. If you can divide people along racial lines (which is easy to do because most people are intellectually lazy) you can screw both of them and make big bucks in the process.
Detroit is the center of new program for reducing the wages and benefits of its workers by pitting one protected group against the other. A protected group is one which has been historically discriminated against to such an extent that the Congress of the United States determined that they needed special protections to keep from being unfairly denied jobs, raises and promotions or being unfairly dismissed. The way anti-discrimination laws are written today an employer can refuse anyone a job or a promotion because of their color, their sex, their religion, their age or a physical disability that has nothing to do with the job. The trick is not to do it to one group without doing it to all of them. Throw in a few young, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males for ballast and you've got all you need to do a job on everybody who isn't in "the club."
Ford Motor Company is leading the way for the entire country with its so-called "deadwood" offer to employees identified as inferior performers. Of course, the "reasoning" behind discrimination against blacks, women, older workers, etc. has always been that "they" are inferior performers. But by applying the "deadwood" label to INDIVIDUALS who "just happen to be" black, female, over 45, etc., the companies can accomplish the same things they did when they were being up front with what they were doing. I am in middle of a lawsuit right now that would have exposed that racket for what is a long time ago if the judge hadn't slapped a gag order on me and allowed the car companies to advertise on every news program going at critical times in the proceedings. I can't tell you who said what or show you the documents that tell the whole story. Until we go to trial, I can tell you only this: the weaker the defendant's case the longer it tries to delay. The company has been delaying its showdown with me since 1992.
The bottom line is money. Screw a lot of people a little and make a bundle on volume.