Fortune: Forbes Lite

I've come to know Fortune as a sort of equal player to Forbes, only instead of avoiding it like the plague, I end up reading some of their articles, because they are fused with CNN.com... so if there's ever a story I'd like to read via "CNN Money," I end up reading what is basically Forbes Lite.

Today I read a particularly interesting article about the shutdown of 21 of Delphi's 29 plants in the United States. Delphi is asking a bankruptcy court to void its contract with the United Auto Workers union and General Motors to shut down the plants. Did I mention that this means approximately 24,500 of Delphi's 34 thousand employees will be laid off, including 8,100 salaried employees and thousands more hourly workers? That's funny. Because Fortune didn't.

Fortune instead chose to use its space talking about the possibility of a UAW strike. How terrible would that be? Well as it turns out, pretty bad for General Motors, who could be forced into bankruptcy by a strike. Newsworthy? Yes. But Fortune paints a "oh the poor multinational corporation with poor leadership and flawed marketing" picture without even mentioning what the workers have been through, or why they might strike. Here's a hint: they're all losing their jobs. Here's something else: they can't come to a labor agreement with Delphi, who wants to cut hourly wages from $27/hour to $16.50/hour.

Fortune paints this situation to be another one of the union being a bully, pushing around a company for it's own selfish needs. Does it seem like sixteen an hour is pretty good pay? Well how about we ask the nation's captains of industry to take a 39% tax increase, and then we'll see how much 39% of one's income really means to people.