I'd like see workers get good wages, but my first concern is for the 416,200 people in Michigan who are unemployed.
 

About those small cars. I've read that the Big 3 make money on big cars and SUVs and lose money on small cars. I've never heard an explanation for that, but here is my theory: Although there is more metal in a big car, by far the largest part of the production cost of any size UAW-built car is the labor. The man-hours required to build a big car aren't all that much higher than for a small car. Therefore, it is easier to make a profit on a car sold for $40,000 than one sold for $15,000. To see if anyone agrees with my theory, I did some web research. This is from a March 7, 2008 article by Sam Abuelsamid in Autobloggreen:

A large part of the cost of cars is tied up in areas like engineering, labor and tooling. Those costs are pretty much the same regardless of whether you're building a Toyota Yaris or a Lexus. The cost of extra materials has been less than the price differential that customers have been willing to pay.

This is from a September 26, 2006 article by David Kiley in Business Week:

Because of the high cost of running plants manned by the unionized United Auto Workers, combined with the low profit margins on small cars, U.S. automakers haven't been able to manufacture small cars profitably in the U.S. in decades.

In order to have a middle class, you have to have a lower class, and if I had to pick a group to make up the lower class, it would be the people without the education or skills that would enable them to make more than enough to get by. When we speak of the "unskilled laborer", we are talking about people not required to have advanced education or special skills. They should not expect a wage that would make them "middle class". The people that should be rewarded with higher incomes are those who've undergone the effort and expense to get an education.

Unions like to claim credit for creation of the middle class in America, but it is just not true. Income is a measure of production, and what causes productivity to increase is education and improved technology.

So, destruction of the middle class is one of Bush and the neocons' goals? I don't remember that as a campaign platform. Sounds like union histrionics to me. I just don't see what Bush & Co. would gain by the destruction of the middle class. The middle class is indeed shrinking, but is it because they are moving into the upper class. Economist Stephen Rose had an article in the 12/23/07 Washington Post called "5 Myths About the Poor Middle Class". Here are some excepts:

[F]ewer people today live in households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 (a reasonable definition of "middle class") than in 1979. But the number of people in households that bring in more than $100,000 also rose from 12 percent to 24 percent. There was no increase in the percentage of people in households making less than $30,000. So the entire "decline" of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder. For married couples, median incomes have grown in inflation-adjusted dollars by 25 percent since 1979.

Per capita gross domestic product has increased by more than 65 percent since 1979 -- growth that translates to $26,000 per household.

[D]emographic changes have sparked many misunderstandings about the economic health of the middle class. For example, Americans today are more likely to live in single-adult households than they were 30 years ago. Adjust incomes to take into account this shift, along with increasing employer contributions to retirement savings and to health insurance premiums, and you find that the real middle-class median income has risen 33 percent, or $18,000, since 1979. Of course, that's a third less than the $26,000 that those households would have gotten if the growth had been distributed equally. But the middle class didn't stand still, either.