With the Big Three automakers and the UAW asking Congress for billions of dollars, hardworking Queens waitress Anna Cruz was taking a short break from her job yesterday and getting angrier by the minute.
“It’s a waste of money,” Cruz, 22, fumed about Detroit’s demands for a bailout – courtesy of taxpayers like her.
“That money could be better used,” she added. “I have little sympathy for the carmakers.”
A senior at Hunter College, Cruz is majoring in classical archeology and works three days a week just to pay her tuition.
During a break outside her job at Jungle Lime Mexican Grill on Ninth Avenue, Cruz was steaming about the attitude of automakers like GM, which warned yesterday that if it doesn’t get the mega-bailout, there will be “severe, long-term ripple consequences to the US economy.”
“I don’t even have a car – why should I give them my money?” asked Cruz, of Astoria.
Cruz said she earns about $10 an hour – not that much more than the $7.15-an-hour minimum wage. And that’s $10 an hour only when times are good, which they haven’t been lately.
“I work really hard to get it,” she said of her salary and tips.
Cruz also said she has an SUV-sized problem with the outrageous featherbedding in Detroit known as the “job banks.”
To safeguard workers from the risk of layoffs, the Big Three came to a job-security agreement with the powerful United Auto Workers more than 20 years ago that has been drawing increasing fire as they plead for taxpayer help.
As a result, some 5,000 autoworkers at General Motors and about 12,000 altogether in the United States are guaranteed a good wage. Instead of bending sheet metal, they get salaries for doing crossword puzzles.
“I don’t think people should get paid for nothing. That’s stupid,” said Cruz.
“The companies should work on getting these people other jobs.”
The job-bank salaries are more than $30 an hour, a lot more than Cruz makes, and cost companies like General Motors upwards of half a billion dollars a year.
Ashley Brunning, a bartender in Chelsea, called the job banks “absolutely ridiculous.”
“People getting paid for nothing. It’s not fair . . . I work really hard,” said Brunning, who pours drinks at Lasagna Ristorante on Eighth Avenue and makes about $20 an hour.
“This is a true recession. We need to keep every cent we have. They need to find another solution without using our money.”
Cruz wondered why the executives aren’t restructuring their vast work forces into something more efficient.
Cruz also was ticked off when the heads of the auto giants first came to Washington a couple of weeks ago to ask for big bucks while taking corporate jets to the nation’s capital.
“They’re asking for money but not cutting their own expenses,” she said.
Maybe that’s why for new hearings – running from tomorrow to Friday – the auto execs are driving from Detroit to DC. They’re expected to appear more humble than their previous testimony, when they refused to admit they’d made disastrous mistakes.
“I think we learned a lot from that experience,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally said.
Tell it to Anna Cruz.