GM CEO Mary Barra served as an example that the American Dream is alive and well during last night's State of the Union address.
If you were busy not going blind with boredom watching the State of the Union pep rally last night, you missed President Obama's callout to GM's new CEO, Mary Barra. An intelligent and accomplished engineer and executive with an MBA from Stanford, she seems to be unable to get away from the facts that (1) she's female and (2) she wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth. To quote the prez directly:
They believe, and I believe, that here in America, our success should depend not on accident of birth, but the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams. That's what drew our forebears here. It's how the daughter of a factory worker is CEO of America's largest automaker.
Not to discredit Ms. Barra or her father's hard work, but is her ascent truly a Horatio Alger–level tale of an escape from poverty? Ray Makela, Ms. Barra's father, worked for 40 years as a tool-and-die maker in a Pontiac factory. That's not an easy job by any stretch, nor is it one that has ever been overcompensated. But according to the UAW, a veteran hourly worker at GM in 1970 would have made $49,500 per year, after adjusting for inflation. That was higher than the median household income in the U.S. in 1970 of $46,089, again adjusting for inflation. Those were also the days of robust health insurance and pensions (of the very kind that contributed to GM's eventual bankruptcy).
Should we, then, be any more surprised that Ms. Barra went on to college, a managerial job at GM, a Stanford graduate degree, and then worked her way up the corporate ladder to the CEO's office than we would be if she was the daughter of an accountant? Or a restaurant owner, pharmacist, or insurance seller?
Well, yes, we should. That's because "factory worker" still carries a negative connotation in America. It implies an unskilled laborer toiling away in an Upton Sinclair nightmare, perhaps looking forward to spending twopence on a Cadbury bar at the apothecary on the way home. This isn't true anymore, and it wasn't true when Mary Barra's father worked for Pontiac. But it was an old stereotype used for political rhetoric, just the same as Mr. Obama went on to show the American Dream at work when the "son of a single mom can be President." Imagine the surprise felt by the millions of single mothers in America upon learning that their children aren't consigned to mediocrity.
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If Mr. Obama is serious about wanting to rebuild the American middle class, he would do well to revisit Horatio Alger's nineteenth-century novels. They weren't usually rags-to-riches stories, but about people fighting their way up from poverty to the middle class. It's a middle class that has been shrinking in size and capability ever since the mid 1970s, when the U.S. began to lose manufacturing jobs in droves. Demeaning today's factory workers as being at the bottom of the ladder won't help.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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