The Elusive Floor Sweeper

During the hubbub over the flagging U.S. auto industry, right-wingers who revel in providing aid and comfort to the powerful interests who least need their aid and comfort railed against the auto union as the problem with the car business. Their most resonating distortion was “the factory worker making seventy dollars an hour sweeping floors.” That is what I will refer to as a Fox figure because it is false.

The Fox Army took to all the news network shows and cited this legend ad nauseum until scores of unquestioning fear bunnies accepted it as truth. Meanwhile, the Wolf Blitzers and Nora O’Donnells allowed this mythoid to go unchecked. They never tried to hunt down this janitor with an annual salary of $124,800, nor did they report on their efforts to find such a person.
What’s the problem? It ain’t the goddamn yeti. You don’t have to set up hidden cameras in the wilderness and hope against all odds that this character eventually skulks by. It isn’t like U.S. auto factories are the Bat Cave. I’ve pulled one up on Google maps.

So there you go Nora and Wolf. Get a thermos of coffee and a good book and wait for some workers to show up at a plant. Snoop around a little. Ask people how much they make an hour. Ask if they know of the elusive floor sweeper. Do something instead of swallowing Fox Army poison all day.

Until then I will continue to have to listen to my conservative friends puke this misinformation back with a confidence that would suggest they actually know this devastating floor sweeping monster exists and is single-handedly taking down the American Auto industry.

Fudging and finessing is what the Fox army does. If one were to bust it on this $70/hr bullshit, it would retort that with pension, health, education benefits etc. a person sweeping floors at GM makes a lot of money. I will concede that the GM janitor does receive health benefits which German and Japanese auto workers do not receive. Aha! Oh, but wait. Germany and Japan both have universal healthcare. Don’t fuckin’ get me started.

Speaking of healthcare, the Fox Army uses the floor sweeper when discussing the auto industry the same way it uses the concept of tort abuse in the healthcare reform debate. As they tell it, if we hunt and kill the floor sweeper the American auto industry will start making cars the world wants just as some lady in Walla Walla with cancer won’t be dropped from her insurance policy if we pass tort reform. What’s the Fox Army’s next campaign: The chupacabra – the real culprit in air pollution?