They Should Be Worried
The Highest-Paying Blue-Collar Jobs Left in America. 
More than 3,000 workers who signed up over the last year to leave Ford and G.M. subsequently decided to stay. These are, after all, the highest-paying blue-collar jobs left in America. Even so, workers are departing from the auto industry en masse, escaping — as they put it in interviews — increasingly difficult working conditions at companies they fear will desert them. Skilled auto workers — electricians, millwrights, tool makers — are similarly disheartened.Communities are fragmenting, families are relocating, and years of individual choices tethered to the notion of a certain kind of job in a certain kind of place are giving way to uncertainty, regret and loss of control.
“The question is, Are we seeing a final end to what we have called blue-collar aristocracy?” asks Sheldon H. Danziger, a public policy researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Big Steel is gone, coal is gone, shipbuilding is gone — all the big industrial unions are gone or going, except the auto workers. These are the people who had the strongest ability to fight, and now they seem to be giving up the struggle.”Two years ago, the Big Three announced their intention to shed tens of thousands of workers by 2008. The buyouts, negotiated with the United Automobile Workers, are an attempt to orchestrate a huge downsizing in a kindlier, more orderly manner. Ford Motor in particular has told its younger employees, through a series of job fairs, that good incomes await them in other industries, especially if they avail themselves of one of the tuition subsidies that Ford offers as a buyout option. On a more ominous note, however, Ford has no other choice but to lay off or buy out workers if the company hopes to remain competitive.
