Sometimes it’s one of those unguarded moments that gives one a particular insight. My favorite today is this quote in The New York Times this morning: “This is a big, big hunk of ballast over the side,” said James P. Womack, chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute in Cambridge, Mass.”

The “ballast” Womack was referring to were human beings, workers who found themselves with no choice but to abandon their jobs because of the incompetence and greed of management at General Motors and Delphi, and a global economic system that is now motoring along based on the prime directive of driving down wages. Roughly 35,000 workers at GM and about 12,600 Delphi workers are taking buy-outs to leave the companies.

Reading that quote from Womack, I thought of the Twilight Zone episode where a racist character played by Vic Morrow is transported back in time to live in various scenarios as a hunted minority or oppressed person. Womack should be forced to live the lives of those thousands of workers who took buy-outs, not by choice but under pressure–the pressure that they were soon to be cast into the streets and that the best deal they could get for themselves now was a wad of cash that can never replace a decent-payin job with fair benefits and, most important, a dignified retirement.

Somebody should follow these workers–find out where they are in ten years, what kinds of jobs they found and what their lives are like. I predict it will not be a pretty story–the “ballast” thrown over the side may make the bottom line of two corporations look prettier but it will be a lot uglier on there in the communities where these workers will now have to figure out how to survive.