... financial executives have been fired in large numbers and taking pay cuts that reduced their income to a fraction of what was expected six months ago. Auto workers have not. Financial firms are in the process of laying off hundreds of thousands of their best paid workers (50,000 at Citibank alone); auto firms are not.

The shrinkage of the financial industry, and the vastly reduced pay prospects of its workers, seem entirely reasonable to me, though of course extremely sad for people who put themselves through expensive rounds of schooling in order to secure luxe jobs on Wall Street which have now disappeared leaving them broke and trying to sell the houses and cars they can no longer afford into a panicked local market. But I am fairly sure that the auto workers do not want the deal, as a class, that those rapacious financial executives have been given, which includes horrifying job insecurity, massive paycuts at the discretion of their managers, and for many or most of them, the knowledge that they will almost certainly never again earn a tenth of what they had set their lives up to expect. Believe it or not, having your life ripped up in front of you and your industry destroyed, and all the plans you made fifteen years ago to build a secure future evaporate, doesn't get magically more fun because you've got an MBA.
...

In short, if the Detroit were given the deal that the financial industry has actually gotten, rather than the deal that they got in the pervasive blogger fantasy world where everyone in the industry is using government funds to continue exactly as they were before, Ron Gettlefinger would hardly be a happy man. And I think that most of the people who [auto industry defenders think] of as picking on the auto workers would be willing to accept a deal in which the Big Three got some funds in order to put its balance sheet back together, then started firing people at will until they were small enough to make a profit again.