To all the union haters who cried "foul" after the government bailed out General Motors, let me direct your attention to this week's news of a new labor agreement between GM and the United Auto Workers union.
The deal has no regular pay raises, but includes a $5,000 signing bonus, something that should be popular with all the Republican-leaning Wall Street types who cash much bigger bonus checks every year. Union workers will also get profit sharing, plus a boost in starting pay rates for the new hires in GM's two-tier system.
There's also the 5,000+ new jobs that will be created under the agreement as General Motors brings more assembly work to its U.S. manufacturing plants and could include reopening the former Saturn plant in Tennessee.
So that's tens of thousands of jobs saved and strengthened, and thousands more being created as workers and management share in the soaring profits of a revitalized American company that was written off by the conventional wisdom of those who were aghast at the government bailout plan in 2008. To those people I ask, what other government money has been spent so wisely in the past three years to yield such an economic boon?
My guess is we won't hear much from the union haters on this one. They'll just watch their new GM stock grow in value and keep quiet.
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