Nomally this kind of story wouldn’t be of much interest in politics. If a company’s workers start drinking and smoking marijuana on their breaks, it should be an issue for ownership and management. In this case, though,we are ownership, thanks to the huge government bailout that kept this Chrysler plant in operation.  Barack Obama made that same point just a couple of months ago in a splashy visit to garner the adulation of these workers, as the Detroit Fox affiliate reports in their exposé:

Fox 2’s Rob Wolchek got a tip about what some guys are doing at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit. This is the same plant that President Barack Obama visited back in July and talked about the significance of manufacturing in America.

The same place where the President remarked on the tax-payer generated government loan saying “I believed that if each of us were willing to work and sacrifice in the short term — workers, management, creditors, shareholders, retirees, communities — it could mark a new beginning for a great American industry. And if we could summon that sense of teamwork and common purpose, we could once again see the best cars in the world designed, engineered, forged, and built right here in Detroit, right here in the Midwest, right here in the United States of America.”

The big question here is this: were they stoned while Obama spoke, or did they feel the need to get stoned afterward?

Of course, this is obviously a very small number of employees conducting themselves in this manner, so it’s unfair to paint all of the workers at this plant with a broad brush.  It’s not unfair, though, to point out that management and supervision at this plant seems to have been completely unaware that these workers are building cars while intoxicated or at the least under the influence of alcohol and marijuana.  Perhaps that could explain the decisionmaking that led Chrysler into bankruptcy in the first place, and why betting on their recovery with billions in taxpayer dollars wasn’t such a hot idea at all.