Here are a few ways clues that show very clearly the hit many workers are taking. The UAW has had to go on strike against American Axle after talks broke down late last night over a new contract. Check out what the company wants 3,600 workers to accept, according to The Wall Street Journal:

The company has said it is looking to reduce its "all-in" hourly labor costs in North America from more than $70 an hour — which includes health, retiree and other fringe benefits — to something closer to $27 an hour for production workers, or $35 an hour including skilled trades workers, who typically are paid more. American Axle also has said it wants changes to work rules and job classifications to improve plant efficiency.

    Right. The company wants to obliterate a decent pay scale. Just eyeballing the overall number it looks like the company wants workers to labor for about 12 bucks an hour.

    And over at Ford, the company would prefer not to have workers at all:

The Ford Motor Company is applying the hard sell these days — piling on incentives, doling out marketing DVDs and brochures, and making offers it hopes are too good to pass up.

But Ford’s big new push is not to sell cars. Instead, it is trying to sign up thousands of workers to take buyouts, partly by convincing them that their brightest future lies outside the company that long offered middle-class wages for blue-collar jobs.

So, Ford is pitching a buffet of buyout packages that are easily among the richest ever offered to factory workers, including one-time cash payments of $140,000 or college tuition plans for an entire family.

    And…

Ford has eliminated more than 32,000 jobs over the last two years through buyouts and early retirements. But it needs to cut more to improve productivity, make room for transfers from its former Visteon parts plants, and pave the way for new hires at wages of $14 an hour — roughly half of current pay scales.

    So, you see, the strike at American Axle and the Ford buy-outs are two sides of the same coin: the shrinking of basic pay and benefits, either through a draconian contract demand or an offer to leave a company for chunk of money that probably will not suffice most people once they find out what awaits them in the job market of the future.

    And how do African-Americans fare in this environment?

    My friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research have the grim news:

African-American workers have been particularly hard hit by the decline in U.S. manufacturing, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).  In 1979, almost one-in-four black workers in the United States had a manufacturing job. Today, fewer than one-in-ten black workers are in manufacturing.

The report, "The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Manufacturing, 1979-2007," by economist John Schmitt and senior research associate Ben Zipperer, details the simultaneous sharp decline in both black employment in manufacturing and the unionization rates of black workers.

"Manufacturing jobs, particularly unionized jobs in the auto industry, were an important part of what built the black middle class after World War II," said John Schmitt, a co-author of the report.

Today, only 15.7 percent of all black workers are union members or covered by a union contract at their workplace. Twenty-five years ago, that share was 31.7 percent. Part of the reason for the decline in unionization among African Americans is the decline in U.S. manufacturing. But even within manufacturing, unionization rates have been falling. On average, manufacturing workers are now no more likely to be in a union than workers in the rest of the economy.

The study, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, found that the share of African Americans in manufacturing jobs fell from 23.9 percent in 1979 to 9.8 percent last year. From 1983 to 2007, unionization rates among African Americans dropped from 31.7 to 15.7 percent. Unionization rates also dropped among whites (from 22.2 to 13.5 percent) and Hispanics (24.2 to 10.8 percent) during the same period, but the declines were not as steep as those for African Americans.

    There is a fairly good snapshot of where we are heading as a nation: lower wages forced upon workers, jobs lost because companies are seeking to lower their "cost of doing business" (read: decent wages) and a hit particularly on African-Americans, though no one gets out unscathed.