Housing crash tour stopping in Austin (Howe, Nevada: mortgages, new home, job market)
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Members of the Laborers’ International Union of North America are making a stop in Austin as part of a 3,300-mile, 10-city tour to protest large homebuilders’ roles in the U.S. Housing market crash.
LIUNA officials said the “Build America so America Works” RV tour aims to highlight the role that Pulte Homes and groups like Centex, KB Home and Lennar in Austin played in the collapse and loss of construction jobs by offering subprime and exotic mortgages.
Hopefully they will give those homebuilders hell...
Members of the Laborers’ International Union of North America are making a stop in Austin as part of a 3,300-mile, 10-city tour to protest large homebuilders’ roles in the U.S. Housing market crash.
LIUNA officials said the “Build America so America Works” RV tour aims to highlight the role that Pulte Homes and groups like Centex, KB Home and Lennar in Austin played in the collapse and loss of construction jobs by offering subprime and exotic mortgages.
Hopefully they will give those homebuilders hell...
As long as they aren't coming here under the misapprehension that they're going to turn Texas into a "union state" - we've already seen what that can do to a state's economy and we're not interested.
....Built on the backs of cheap, largely illegal, labor.....the hidden(actually, not so hidden), story of how the sunbelt cities were able to build out so fast and cheap.
.....Fact, no one wants to see their own sector/industry go down the low-wage spriral "rabbit hole", but if its unrelated to what they do, its quite fine, especially if they can purchase new homes cheaply(or at least what appears to be cheaper, though those aforementioned homebuilders simply pocket the savings anyway).
...Question, is Texas just absorbing outside jobs relocating from union-states per the west coast, midwest, and east coast, or are they actively creating/incubating their own? Is this a Zero-sum game of charades, where states with essentially no bar/regulations per labor absorb jobs from those states that have fought bloody battles for over half a century, until they end up being outsourced anyway outside the country itself?
...Interesting thought.....Several states that also have no labor regulations/standards, AND no state/corporate tax as well, have statewide double-digit unemployment, including Florida, both Carolinas, and Nevada, with Arizona being close behind. If having no regs or taxes are such a job panacea, why are those states suffering? Face it, the truth is that at best those low-bar states can shuffle around national jobs from high to low regulation areas, and can't incubate/create jobs anymore readily than states from whence they came.
Fact....most of those states that gave huge subsidies/tax breaks, actually corporate welfare, to plants who "relocated" to the sunbelt received FAR less jobs than promised, AND their state, via their taxpayers, funded collectively a huge sum per subsidies, so a small handful of workers could get "non-union" jobs....
So unions are not the answer, but "reshuffling" a fixed-deck of cards, per a fixed number of national jobs, so those few can simply temporarily gravitate to the non-union sunbelt, while they wait for technology to enable them to be ultimately outsourced outside the country itself, is no answer either....
We are ALL competing with third-world wages/standards untimately, and that is where corporate plants are now going, and where the rest WILL be going when feasible. As soon as we can tool an entire plant in Thailand/Vietnam, for example, those deep south plant workers will have to either
bring wages down to 3 dollars an hour, or close up.....
Here is a great read, BTW, per how companies just play non-regulated states like Texas and the rest of the sunbelt against each other, and end up costing taxpayers hugely, per levied AND deferred taxes, and end up pulling out in a few years to outsource in the third-world anyway, leaving a tax-subsidy provided plant to sit and rust.
As long as they aren't coming here under the misapprehension that they're going to turn Texas into a "union state" - we've already seen what that can do to a state's economy and we're not interested.
To me that is a blanket statement painting with one broad stroke.
The unions, (way back when) were not the enemy. The union protected jobs so people could make a living wage, have health care, and a retirement.
Somewhere down the line many people in the U.S. developed a hate for unions. Somewhere down the line many decided a large population of workers should not have a decent wage, and benefits for some reason.
It's my belief a major change had to occur and largely was a propaganda campaign against the unions. It worked. Many people despise the unions.
Way back when the unions protected the worker from working in hazardous conditions. There were many deaths in relation to working conditions that were stopped because the company had to make adjustments so people would not fall into a vat of hot lava and die.
Before the unions people didn't have the right to go to the bathroom for fear of losing their job.
I've seen what happened over the years and all the people that would have been able to work, live, have families, and support them now cannot because there are no jobs.
And let me very clear, I do not like what most of the unions became. However, there was a time when honesty, fairness, and loyalty did occur. The "worker-safety" was primary. Now it seems the union forgot about the worker and only cares about keeping the structure of the union afloat, (the organization minus the real workers).
Over time they became too corrupt and it became difficult to distinguish the union from "the company".
It used to be the worker bought the vehicle they had a part in making because they could afford it.
Years back, there was a letter to the editor in the Austin American-Statesman from someone who had moved to Texas from a union state. Why had he moved? Because the companies that he worked for had either closed or had to downsize dramatically, because the unions would not acknowledge that in poor economic times, they, too, had to compromise. So, being unable to find work where he was from, he came here where there WAS work.
His letter was a complaint because he could not find work for the exhorbitant hourly (easily three times what someone making a good living would make here) that he had made "back home". He didn't seem to quite get that there was a connection between there being NO work "back home" and LOTS of work here (if he was willing to work for a reasonable hourly rate that would support him and a family quite nicely here) - his solution for this "problem" was to unionize Texas. Talk about brainwashed!
The unions did, indeed, have a good purpose way back when, but in modern times, they seem to exist for the purpose of supporting their own existence, not for the workers. I've worked in places elsewhere where a union organizer got hired on specifically to try to unionize the place, without checking to see that the workers ALREADY had the benefits the union was promising to get for them - they were simply laughed at, because the union had so obviously sent them in without doing their homework for the sole purpose of getting bodies to pay them for what they already had. (Sounds a little bit like the mafia wanting protection money to me.)
In any case, Texas is not a union state and, please God, will never be. It's not the sole explanation for why our economy is what it is, but it's a factor.
Why had he moved? Because the companies that he worked for had either closed or had to downsize dramatically, because the unions would not acknowledge that in poor economic times, they, too, had to compromise. So, being unable to find work where he was from, he came here where there WAS work.
Ahem...the last of the union sold out along with the companies quite a few years ago. A deal was cut. The deal was the long timers could keep their job or retire early. The concession was the next round of workers were going to get paid much less. Then, when the next group of workers came in at a much less pay the job went overseas, south, or wherever it is companies pay their employee's a pittance.
Even the buildings the workers used to work in are imploded so there is no evidence there was actually any work there in the first place. Then it's even televised as some great event. Strange to me.
The idea that union workers are greedy is more of the propaganda. The union workers I knew were hard working. Yes, there are always going to be workers that do not work like they are suppose to but that is in every job market. When did it become not ok to make a living wage, and have benefits???? How does that make a person greedy?
The union compromised with the jobs of future generations. Seriously, it happened that way. I didn't make it up.
Companies are telling non-union workers that their jobs are going overseas. Take the tech industry for one example. Programmers in the USA can't find work. Why? Because their jobs are gone...overseas.
Overseas, overseas, overseas. I'm sorry to repeat myself but maybe the next time you use customer service on the phone ask what country they're from. That is if people are even using the phone for other than texting.
As long as they aren't coming here under the misapprehension that they're going to turn Texas into a "union state" - we've already seen what that can do to a state's economy and we're not interested.
Try living on the $8hour a Walmart checker makes and see if Texas needs unions or not. Walmart employees are the biggest users of public assistance also. So your taxes are subsidising Walmarts low wages. You are quick to complain about the perceived problems with Unions but will you have the integrity to do the same about corporate abuse in Texas?
Granted Unions arent immune from wongdoing but in the balance of things its time Texas had some strong Union representation. Things have swung way too far in the direction of unaccountable corporations in this state. In its positive state a Union is just people power, the little guy having a say. If you're against that then I dont know what to say to you.
It takes a special kind of person to sit back see Walmart employees on food stamps without healthcare while the Walton family pulls in endless billions and say this is 'how it should be'. Do you root for Scrooge to stick it to Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol?
So it is walmart's fault for giving jobs to unskilled people, but it is not the unskilled worker's fault for failing to improve himself? give me a break.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbius
Try living on the $8hour a Walmart checker makes and see if Texas needs unions or not. Walmart employees are the biggest users of public assistance also. So your taxes are subsidising Walmarts low wages. You are quick to complain about the perceived problems with Unions but will you have the integrity to do the same about corporate abuse in Texas?
Granted Unions arent immune from wongdoing but in the balance of things its time Texas had some strong Union representation. Things have swung way too far in the direction of unaccountable corporations in this state. In its positive state a Union is just people power, the little guy having a say. If you're against that then I dont know what to say to you.
I think unions could definitely use an overhaul, but one of the alternatives to watching them disappear is seeing more and more Americans suffer and sit out of work while jobs continue to go overseas.
Union employees are some of the hardest working people I've ever seen in my own experience. I spent eight years in an administrative (non-union) position with a Sprinkler Fitters subcontractor (Local #483 out of SF, CA) and those guys worked incredibly long and hard hours ... 12-14 hour days, working day, swing, and graveyard shifts, six and seven days a week at times until the job was done. They went through rigorous training throughout the year on top of the hours they worked and sometimes on jobs that required two hour (unpaid) commutes from their homes to get to.
I won't try to speak for unions as a whole, because my experience was only with one of thousands out there. I know that many unions represent nothing but waste and extortion. I'm still behind unions for many of America's workers however - maybe even more than ever now.
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