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Its a viscious cycle. Non Union low wages / less benefits means less money to spend. This means we will buy Made in China cheap products and our money will got out of country as well as manufacturing jobs will be lost. With union jobs, we were buying Made in USA labels.
Not quite. Unions make up 11% of the workforce. Their "so called" higher wages are insignificant with regards to buying power.
Public sector union benefits means more money that must be taxed. And that means there is less money to spend.
Regarding Made in USA - you can look to government regulations that cripple american companies, corporate taxes that are the highest in the world, and China manipulating the dollar for that.
US corporate tax may be high but companies pay less.paying less tax doesnt mean boosting the economy of US.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ringwise
Not quite. Unions make up 11% of the workforce. Their "so called" higher wages are insignificant with regards to buying power.
Public sector union benefits means more money that must be taxed. And that means there is less money to spend.
Regarding Made in USA - you can look to government regulations that cripple american companies, corporate taxes that are the highest in the world, and China manipulating the dollar for that.
I love unions but when they ask for impossible things like pensions and fully-paid healthcare benefits during retirement... well, they took it too far... there isn't anything wrong with demanding better wages but demanding better perks that were generously given to begin with... that's crossing the line...
Here the union pays non union workers 10 bucks an hour with no benefits to picket for them. was on today's front page 9news in Co. what a bunch of hypocrites.
When I was young I briefly worked at a union plant that makes weatherstripping for cars. The first week I was there I ran out of work on my line so they moved me to the carton making area. The guy who worked there full time was an older fellow who had been with the company 20+ years, most of them in that area. By the end of the first night I was making boxes at about four times the rate he was, and he was asking me questions about what he should do. It occurred to me that, because of the union contract, if he and I both worked there until the end of time he would always make more money than me despite the fact that he was unproductive and incompetant.
Union wages and the apathy it bred is what drove up the prices of American manufactured products and made them UNcompetitive on the world scene. If some of these US companies had not outsourced their manufacturing, they would have gone bankrupt. It is American workers who decided to buy that $4 T-shirt from Walmart (made in China), rather than the $25 T-shirt from Snooty Inc. (made in California). If RCA were still producing poor-quality TV sets with union labor, we would be seeing $33,000 price tags.
The good news is that the rest of the world (okay, not all, but the BRICs and a few others) are coming up the income ladder themselves and, thus, American labor will once again become competitive. But you probably won't be seeing the $75 an hour manufacturing jobs again for a while until inflation brings wages up to that level.
Private company unions, while needed in the past, are on the wane now for good reason.
Public "servant" unions should NEVER have been allowed.
You seem to be incapable of studying the facts of the matter regarding the migration of American capital to foreign nations. Excess profits were the cause of spiraling consumer cost in the fifties, period. Union labor was simply trying to keep up with the inflationary nature of U.S. economic realities. Hating unions is now the popular thing to do, the various bluster radio jocks have targeted those who are in conflict with the upper class who pays their salaries. Your claim of 75 dollar an hour jobs are the stuff of right wing blather that confuses those who can't/won't read the truth.
Your example comes from the claims made against UAW workers who were unfairly accused of living high on the hog while the "poor auto companies" were in a world of hurt. U.S. auto manufacturers put themselves in harms way when they abdicated their old quality standards in favor of maximizing their bottom line. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, unions aren't the problem, the present day economic debacle has nothing to do with unions yet some seem to focus on them as an object of their hatred, this is the result of good propaganda on the part of America's corporate strategists who are bent on destroying the working class and pushing them back to the days when labor was just another cheap commodity.
Funny, I come from the flip side of your example. I was married to one of those engineers, and yes - there IS a difference between the union and non-union workers. The union worker ONLY cares about their job security, their salary, their benefits and their retirement. The non-union worker cares about all those things, AND the company. When the non-union worker can't carry a part, because it might take the job away from a union worker, yet makes production less efficient and costly, what else can one think? Really - it takes a skilled worker to walk a part from one end of the plant to another? And takes days, because the union worker MUST have their break on time, and never works harder than they have to? That's what happens when your job is protected no matter your performance.
I also saw the productivity increase on the line when the unions struck and engineers took over production. And I saw firsthand the violence levied against the engineers because they supported management and getting the job done over bloated union benefits that was killing the company.
You speak of contempt, yet your post drips of contempt towards the "betters". There is contempt on both sides. The contempt towards the non-union workers is nurtured and encouraged, and against those that are just doing their job. The contempt towards union workers is reprimanded and punished, and against those that want to make the union more powerful at the expense of the company.
Just my two cents.
First off I was referring to the posters attempt to characterize those with an education as somehow "better" than those without, the term "betters" was a customary term used to describe the social standing of the upper class in early day America. I don't have anything against non union labor, they are simply non organized, they are still "workers" and I respect all workers regardless of their union affiliation or lack of such affiliation. The engineers I worked around were not contemptuous of those of us in the unionized ranks, yes they worked through our strikes and yes they did our customary jobs during those strikes, they had a different contract that called for them to work regardless of our dispute with the company.
For the most part engineers didn't want to do our work, they couldn't do the machining or other fabrication tasks so they were relegated to the assembly tasks that they could do with little orientation. Supervisors who were formerly of the rank and file union workforce were capable of doing most of the customary fabrication jobs and again we all understood their position as workers with different obligations to the company. Total labor cost in the company I worked for was around seven percent of the sale price of the finished product, not bad and certainly not "killing the company". Benefits, our engineering staff got the same and better benefits than the union people, administrative staff didn't fare so well, they of course weren't unionized as we and the engineers were. Yes, the engineers are unionized in many companies, while they may call their union a "professional society" it is a union nonetheless.
Posturing the union worker as a heartless soul who "ONLY" cares about himself as contrasted with your depiction of the noble engineer who loves the company is almost laughable to me, we had many consortium work teams made up of union, management, and professional workers striving to create efficiencies in the process work and across the entire spectrum of the work environment itself. The company was going towards the Toyota production system, it was inclusive of the union workforce as well as having an understanding of the necessary collaboration of ALL workers in order to succeed.
You want to believe the myth that unions are a destroying force in business and that we must all have faith in the innate wisdom of total management control, I just hope that most American's can see the inevitable truth in all of this, and that is that capital seeks the lowest cost, always, that means your husband and anyone else who can be replaced by cheap foreign labor probably will, it isn't always in our best interest as workers to subscribe to the company mantra of bottom line thinking. Most people know they need to be diligent in their work, union people make good stuff the same as non union people, the difference is a simple one, compensation, you know.... that term that has a big meaning in the upper circles of American corporate life.
You seem to be incapable of studying the facts of the matter regarding the migration of American capital to foreign nations. Excess profits were the cause of spiraling consumer cost in the fifties, period.
Oh yes, those excess profits. Bad bad bad...
I take it that you are pro-union and, thus, incapable of studying the facts of basic business and economics. It's all about fighting THE MAN, who wants to keep the proletariat down, eh comrade?
When labour is one of the major expenses in a business, and that labour can be sourced elsewhere, without a corresponding loss in quality and productivity, then that is good for business. And what is good for business is good for society in the whole for the long term. Competition makes companies more competitive and workers more productive. The centres of entrepreneurial activity and creativity in the USA are not in the centres of unionism, but definitely in places where education, risk-taking, and venture capital come together.
I am sorry that you and your mates can't simply show up for work any more and talk about your fantasy league teams and weekend beer-drinking sessions while "on the clock". Companies need and want more productivity out of its workers these days, and the unions just can't deliver. You might want to save your vitriol for the union bosses who are pulling down ma$$ive salaries for producing NOTHING of value for the USA.
I am sure that the dinosaurs put up a good fight also as they evolved away....
I take it that you are pro-union and, thus, incapable of studying the facts of basic business and economics. It's all about fighting THE MAN, who wants to keep the proletariat down, eh comrade?
When labour is one of the major expenses in a business, and that labour can be sourced elsewhere, without a corresponding loss in quality and productivity, then that is good for business. And what is good for business is good for society in the whole for the long term. Competition makes companies more competitive and workers more productive. The centres of entrepreneurial activity and creativity in the USA are not in the centres of unionism, but definitely in places where education, risk-taking, and venture capital come together.
I am sorry that you and your mates can't simply show up for work any more and talk about your fantasy league teams and weekend beer-drinking sessions while "on the clock". Companies need and want more productivity out of its workers these days, and the unions just can't deliver. You might want to save your vitriol for the union bosses who are pulling down ma$$ive salaries for producing NOTHING of value for the USA.
I am sure that the dinosaurs put up a good fight also as they evolved away....
Comrade? Weekend beer drinking sessions? Fantasy Leagues? Speaking of fantasy...This post is the revealing type that shows the outright disdain for workers from the quintessential pro capital point of view. In this fantasy frame of mind the capital cheerleaders see the worker as a slovenly uncultured lout that has little use in the world except to aid the boss in his accumulative quest for more, more of everything except a little consideration for his fellow man. Business is seen as something more valuable than human life. In this view business is seen as a thing of holiness, pure, impartial, wise, and understanding. Of course our own U.S. history is replete with accounts of business excesses being a real detriment to the advancement of society. We should never forget that American legal slavery was thought of as just another lucrative labor/management affair that had real merit. Oh, but it was "good for business".
Unions however, were the thing that allowed business to have a customer base with the money to spend that business needs to survive. This is the basic element of a fair wage construct that so many business men fought against, even the anti union Henry Ford knew this to be true. The brutal conditions and paltry pay of the early day American workshops were well documented, without the force of worker organization we can't be sure what the present day society would look like. Union workers still don't live in the most splendorous homes nor are they the back bone of the investor class, but they do spend, they contribute on BOTH ends of the economic cycle of earn/spend that has made the U.S. what it was.
Wall Street and the real greedy types in this country ruined that balance, not unions. Capital isn't evil in and of itself, the men who manage the capital however, need to reined in by law, and labor law is one of the most important of those laws that assure a fair system is in place. Unions AND business grew together to make this nation the economic miracle it was. Were unions behind the sub prime mortgage loans? Were unions behind the casino style capitalism that thought up the derivative schemes? Are unions our enemy or are they one of the things that help workers in their fight against this kind of business excess?
Aligning all unionists to the communist party (comrade) or some other evil only shows the density of thinking that these economic cave men operate on. They are stuck in a past part of our history when only the upper class had any value, the rest of us were/are objects of their ridicule, I guess we are beer swilling fools duped by the big union bosses, in this view it is better to be beer swilling fools duped by the capitalist boss I guess. This view also allows us to see the outright hatred for the entire working class not just union workers but ALL workers. Elitism abounds.
The "on the clock" admonition and the assumption that union workers don't really work is the stuff of fantasy. Massive salaries? I think most American's know who is pulling down the "massive salaries"...........Hint, it aint union bosses...
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