Here's a newspaper quote on the GE Appliance Park labor rates:
"American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as “Strike City.” That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be."
I'm relatively agnostic on unions, but in this case, keeping some jobs is better than losing all jobs at this facility right? Jack Welch (who drove outsourcing while leading GE) once predicted that the Appliance Park would not exist past 2000 due to low foreign labor rates. My concern is mainly for workers in this country (the US), that while tariffs (pre-WWII) and a destroyed Europe and Japan (20 years post WWII) allowed for US workers to adapt somewhat harmoniously to technological innovation in the workplace without competition from cheap foreign labor. However, since about 1980 the reduction in global trade restrictions coupled with an opening of a global cheap labor pool in former Soviet states and China/Southeast Asia has created an incentive for US corporations to dramatically reduce manufacturing employment in the US. And again, why are so many cities in the Midwest (Detroit, Gary, Pittsburg, Youngstown, Cleveland, Toledo, Milwaukee) in such bad shape if all of the blue-collar workers who used to work in factories were able to find "better" jobs?