Anti-union = Anti-middle class

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Hype
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Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#1 Post by Hype » Tue Oct 07, 2014 7:55 pm

Image

Inverse Correlation, r = -1.

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Pandemonium
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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#2 Post by Pandemonium » Wed Oct 08, 2014 5:32 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:Image

Inverse Correlation, r = -1.

I worked for the UAW for the better part of 15 years in the aerospace industry. They are parasites.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#3 Post by Hype » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:11 pm

It doesn't follow from one person's experience with one particular union at a particular time that unions aren't good. Data show that union membership correlates with a healthy middle class. That's what the above graph rather dramatically shows. The fact that people reason from "I knew a union, it was shitty." to "Unions are shitty." is why companies like Apple can evade taxes and have huge stores of cash, and yet full-time jobs have not recovered to pre-2007 levels. Face it, it's short-term bad thinking to think what you think.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#4 Post by Pandemonium » Wed Oct 08, 2014 7:57 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:Face it, it's short-term bad thinking to think what you think.
Yeah.... ok.

Remind me again, which Union(s) have you worked for? I mean seriously, I love all the internet articles and charts you bring to the table but I think some real world experience is also valuable when putting forth this kind of amusing socialist fantasy about how labor unions are some sort of great benign force for the downtrodden worker in the 21st century.

And Apple can evade taxes because of corporate filings in tax-friendly countries and outsourcing labor overseas using dirt cheap Chinese near-slave labor. Unionizing Apple's workforce in China is a bit unrealistic. The problem there and with similar large companies that we consumers have hypocritically made multi-billion dollar powerhouses is that our governments have encouraged via loopholes to avoid appropriate taxes by basing operations and manufacturing overseas. Nothing to do with unions.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#5 Post by Hype » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:34 pm

:confused: My union is PSAC. http://psacunion.ca/

I had the same job before it was unionized, and it is far better now.
our governments have encouraged via loopholes to avoid appropriate taxes by basing operations and manufacturing overseas. Nothing to do with unions.
I take it you don't see any connection between e.g., Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and the weakening of unions in a kind of vicious destructive self-sealing cycle? Well, you're just wrong. Governments are not independent from corporate lobbies and brainwashed citizens. Especially not since Citizen's United (which, interestingly, opened up unions to spending unlimited funds too, but union resources are far outstripped by those of employers, i.e., corporations, which is why they exist in the first place, not to compete monetarily, or for access to speech (which apparently *is* money), but to utilize the one thing that workers do have power over their employers with, namely, their work... Citizens United fundamentally upsets this balance.)


http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolit ... 92661.html
The decision was 5-2, with Justice Michael Gableman writing the lead opinion, which found that collective bargaining over a contract with an employer is not a fundamental right for public employees under the constitution. Instead, it's a benefit that lawmakers can extend or restrict as they see fit, he said.
Unions are just groups of organized workers who are pushing for a way to regulate industry in the worker's interests. Government regulations, ideally, would be in the interest of all citizens (including future citizens).

The American political spectrum has been pushed significantly to the right since Reagan, and this has led to both corporate deregulation and the dismantling of unions. The two are DEEPLY connected, since it's EASY to see unions as ineffective if government policies are directly affecting the effectiveness of union demands (or straight-up controlling the ability of unions to call work action / strikes... which they do).

The corporatization of government, education, health, and human nature more generally is intimately connected with unionization. The fact that ordinary people like you have drunk the corporate koolaid and used isolated experiences to confirm these biases isn't surprising, but it is sad. It's not your generation that will suffer from the destruction of unions and the legacy of all this deregulation. It's mine, and your kids', and their kids... who are going to have to build back up everything that has been torn down... if they even can.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#6 Post by Pandemonium » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:12 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote::confused: My union is PSAC. http://psacunion.ca/

I had the same job before it was unionized, and it is far better now.
I was with the UAW twice, both times in aerospace. The first go-round the UAW got in around my third year at the company which was a relatively small subcontractor (about 200 employees). Initially, we got a decent (about 10%) raise but that was pretty much off set by union dues. After two years, we were up for contract negotiations and eventually went on strike... for a whole 2 weeks. The vote to go back to work got us nothing substantial. When I went to work at Boeing in Long Beach, I was back in the UAW and it was quickly apparent that branch was the most corrupt bunch of fuckers I've ever seen. In the 3 years I was there, my pay actually *decreased* thanks to union concessions by bumping the most skilled mechanics down in job description to keep more employees on the payroll at lower company costs (which also equals more union dues). Many union reps on the floor rarely did actual work, often involved in union "activities" like meetings, etc. It was an open secret that union reps would hook up "injured" employees with "union friendly" doctors to get them long term disability claims. That's just the tip of the iceberg here - I could write chapters on the shit I saw. From any sane person's POV, it was a scam from top to bottom designed to protect the lowest common denominator. When I was eventually laid off with hundreds of others, seniority nor my higher job category didn't save me, Boeing and the UAW collaborated to select certain depts to cull so they could move lesser paid people to later fill those positions.

Now let me be clear about something - I'm not blindly and utterly anti-union. Anti-UAW, yeah ok. Organized labor, unions, have a place but like most everything where large amounts of money are to be had, that need has been largely corrupted in the last half century. I don't subscribe to the ideal that a unionized burger flipper or other unskilled union laborer should command the same wage as someone who's earned a college degree and has a specific skill set. It's like the nonsense going on in LA right now about a blanket "living wage" for unskilled workers that's essentially being spearheaded by organized labor:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/s ... ty-council

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#7 Post by Pandemonium » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:19 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:The American political spectrum has been pushed significantly to the right since Reagan, and this has led to both corporate deregulation and the dismantling of unions. The two are DEEPLY connected, since it's EASY to see unions as ineffective if government policies are directly affecting the effectiveness of union demands (or straight-up controlling the ability of unions to call work action / strikes... which they do).
Oh come on. Unions pour millions of dollars into lobbying to get their way. I don't think you're going to see the government step up and put the kibosh on a Ford auto plant strike in our lifetime.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#8 Post by Essence_Smith » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:22 pm

Without the charts and graphs, all that's really being said is our personal experiences don't necessarily reflect whether or not the concept of the union still works in general...that being said I know some people who because of physical and mental issues were only able to keep jobs because they were unionized...doesn't make em all good or all bad either way...

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#9 Post by Hype » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:25 pm

Pandemonium.... You're still spouting Republitarian propaganda taken from the pages of a fictional Ayn Rand universe.

Living wages aren't about giving "burger flippers" the same wages as skilled workers, they're about making it possible to LIVE on a wage for even the lowest paid people. The standard objection is "These are just teenagers/kids saving for college." To which the response is: "No, they aren't. And even if a large percentage of them are, that's still leaving a lot of people unable to live." And anyway, a living wage wouldn't be equivalent to skilled worker wages. Minimum wage hasn't tracked inflation. In fact middle-class wages haven't tracked inflation. At a minimum, I think re-adjusting all wages except for executives to track where they should be now if they had tracked inflation after WW2 would be perfectly reasonable. And that's not socialist... it's just common sense. (Socialist would be the government taking control of the monetary supply at every single company, say, through a 100% tax, and then redistributing it themselves to everyone.)

But your other objection is partially well-taken. Yes, money/power corrupt. But that's not a reason to think we're better with weaker unions. It's a reason for there to be checks and balances on the way unions deal with their money and power. That's completely separate from the absolute demolishing of organized labour that has taken place over the past 30-35 years or so. This isn't in anyone's interest except corporations. You can't fix union-corruption by destroying unions, the same way you can't fix government corruption by destroying governments. This is the fundamental idiotic conceit of libertarians. They're veiled anarchists who mistake corruption of a part with corruption of the whole (a basic composition fallacy).

Your criticisms of the goings on at UAW sound a bit like some of the stuff I saw at PSAC meetings. I don't think that's a strike against unions so much as it's a strike against humanity. But as with democracy itself, the fact that you can end up with idiots in power isn't a reason to get rid of the system, it's a virtue of the system that you can REMOVE idiots from power, and that the alternative is far, far worse.

Oh, and by the way, I think there are a ton of "minimum wage" jobs that badly need unions. Gas station employees, for one, have some of the worst workplace safety, and some of the most exploitative working conditions in North America, outside of farms.

Piketty's "Capital", by the way, is excellent on some of this issue. I think almost no one will read the whole thing (I certainly haven't, but I read lots of bits of it), but I think it's worth taking a look at.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#10 Post by Hype » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:34 pm

Pandemonium wrote:
Adurentibus Spina wrote:The American political spectrum has been pushed significantly to the right since Reagan, and this has led to both corporate deregulation and the dismantling of unions. The two are DEEPLY connected, since it's EASY to see unions as ineffective if government policies are directly affecting the effectiveness of union demands (or straight-up controlling the ability of unions to call work action / strikes... which they do).
Oh come on. Unions pour millions of dollars into lobbying to get their way. I don't think you're going to see the government step up and put the kibosh on a Ford auto plant strike in our lifetime.
Single donors for the Republicans pour in millions. The Koch brothers on their own probably donate more than the collective financial power of many unions.

To your last point: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/pers-j15.html
UAW accepts government ban on strikes
15 January 2009
It has come to light that the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler approved last month by the Bush administration with the support of the incoming Obama administration includes a stipulation that effectively bans strikes or work stoppages by autoworkers.
The clause, which was revealed in a Security and Exchange Commission filing by GM last week, coincides with government demands that the 139,000 workers at Detroit's auto companies agree by February 17 to accept mass layoffs, plant closures and sweeping wage and benefit concessions.
According to the SEC filing, the Treasury Department could declare GM and Chrysler in default and revoke $17.4 billion in loans, throwing the automakers into bankruptcy, if "any labor union or collective bargaining unit shall engage in a strike or other work stoppage."
The effect of this provision is to revoke the legal right to strike, an achievement won by the American working class in bitter struggles against "criminal conspiracy" laws used against striking workers in the 19th century. It was only with the 1935 passage, in the depths of the Great Depression, of the National Labor Relations Act that federal law recognized the right of workers to strike. This concession to the working class was not some freely given gift of the Roosevelt administration. It followed general strikes that erupted in 1934 in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco. Without the strike weapon, workers are reduced to the status of industrial slaves, legally compelled to accept the most brutal conditions of exploitation without any recourse to collective resistance.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#11 Post by Pandemonium » Thu Oct 09, 2014 1:29 am

Adurentibus Spina wrote: To your last point: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/pers-j15.html
UAW accepts government ban on strikes
15 January 2009
It has come to light that the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler approved last month by the Bush administration with the support of the incoming Obama administration includes a stipulation that effectively bans strikes or work stoppages by autoworkers.
The clause, which was revealed in a Security and Exchange Commission filing by GM last week, coincides with government demands that the 139,000 workers at Detroit's auto companies agree by February 17 to accept mass layoffs, plant closures and sweeping wage and benefit concessions.
According to the SEC filing, the Treasury Department could declare GM and Chrysler in default and revoke $17.4 billion in loans, throwing the automakers into bankruptcy, if "any labor union or collective bargaining unit shall engage in a strike or other work stoppage."
See? The UAW sold those GM and Chrysler employees out to keep those union dues coming in. Unemployed 140k worth of workers equals a lot of money gone bye-bye. But.... I guess we could look at it from the glass half full perspective - those workers still have jobs, thanks to the Government tit.
Adurentibus Spina wrote: To your last point: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/pers-j15.html

It followed general strikes that erupted in 1934 in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco. Without the strike weapon, workers are reduced to the status of industrial slaves, legally compelled to accept the most brutal conditions of exploitation without any recourse to collective resistance.
That was fine in the 1930's, but this is 2014. There are infinitely stronger Federal and Local laws mandating safety, workers rights and minimum pay. Further, simple competition and economic conditions forces employers to meet certain standards of pay and benefits to attract and keep employees. Here in the amazin' 21st Century, anyone can opt out of being an "industrial slave" in this country.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#12 Post by Hype » Thu Oct 09, 2014 8:33 am

There's tons of evidence that that isn't the case. In the service industries generally, and especially, wages, hours, and general flouting of employment standards are the norm.

Disagreement with the way the UAW handled the bailouts is one thing, but the point is that it's a counter-example to your claim that the government doesn't (because of the influence of vested interests) try to control labour for the benefit of corporations.

The standard corporate policy these days for entry-level positions is: never hire full-time, but try to get your part-timers to take full-time or higher equivalent hours and responsibilities. Deny overtime pay. Never promote to management from within.

These are, and have been, standard policies for a long time. One might think that if unions were given more support and more leverage, they could actually fight these things. But no, people repeat the stupid mantra "I'm just lucky to have a job." while they work for Wal-Mart for pennies without any hope of job security or real promotion.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#13 Post by Romeo » Thu Oct 09, 2014 8:45 am

Samuel Gompers is my Great Great Uncle by marriage on my Maternal Grandma's side.



Carry on.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#14 Post by Pandemonium » Thu Oct 09, 2014 9:48 am

Adurentibus Spina wrote:The standard corporate policy these days for entry-level positions is: never hire full-time, but try to get your part-timers to take full-time or higher equivalent hours and responsibilities. Deny overtime pay. Never promote to management from within.

These are, and have been, standard policies for a long time. One might think that if unions were given more support and more leverage, they could actually fight these things. But no, people repeat the stupid mantra "I'm just lucky to have a job." while they work for Wal-Mart for pennies without any hope of job security or real promotion.
So it's up to unions to pressure companies to inflate the pay for no-skill job positions to unrealistic levels versus employees bettering themselves by acquiring more marketable job skills and education and moving up or out to better jobs? Who gets employed at Walmart for example with the life plan of stocking shelves and ringing up customers and retiring on such wages in 20 - 40 years? And why is it Walmart's responsibility to provide wages, benefits and job security to unskilled employees that would go far beyond similar positions and skill levels at competing retailers?

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#15 Post by Hype » Thu Oct 09, 2014 11:03 am

Well look, the problem is partially that intense well funded propaganda has led to people tending to think these issues are all-or-nothing. The response I just gave, which you have challenged wasn't a policy-recommendation, it was a description of one facet of the facts that contradict the last thing you said. You claimed that "federal and local laws" are "infinitely stronger" than they were in the 1930s (this is an odd claim on its face, even if I grant the colloquial meaning of your exaggeration). Specifically, you claimed that these laws mandate safety, rights, and pay. While there's partial truth to some of this, the point is vitiated by my description of the accepted and unchallenged practices of corporations LIKE Wal-Mart. I didn't suggest that Wal-Mart is the only company doing this, or the only company that should change, or be forced to change. All that was implied in what I said is that Wal-Mart is a counter-example to the claim that the "infinitely stronger" "federal and local laws" are actually effective in ways that matter to workers today. The fact is, it isn't just Wal-Mart, but they are complicit in the assault on unions and worker's rights. Again, it's not about "paying unskilled workers more than they're worth"... This would be a fair point if I had said something like "Wal-Mart employees and millwrights should be paid identical wages." This is clearly absurd, and not even close to what's being pointed out.

The myth of "moving on to better jobs" is so tiresome. It's a trope trotted out by conservatives all the time. You get these millionaire idiots saying things like "When I was 18 I worked at a burger joint, and then I got my law degree and now I'm a politician, so anyone can do it!" This is absolute fucking nonsense. The system is systematically stacked against the vast majority of people who need these jobs. Starbucks recently publicized a policy that they claim is meant to help their workers "go to college". But, it turns out it's a big fucking scam designed to cut costs and keep their employees marginalized (all you have to do is look at what their policy actually says and how they use it to brainwash their employees into the myth of upward mobility).

Again, look at the data. This isn't about forcing hard-working company executives to shell out uncompetitive wages to lazy replaceable drones. This is about recognizing that the historical fact is that there has been a concerted shift in the employment norms for 40 years that is artificial. It has been orchestrated by a small group of extremely wealthy extremely powerful people and supported by the victims of a propaganda campaign, and the result is that wages for most people haven't tracked inflation. This is inherently damaging, because each year your dollar is worth less than the year before, to the point where at some point your hourly wage, if it doesn't increase, will become almost literally worthless. Look it up. $10 today has the same purchasing power as $3.50 did in 1980. But the extremely wealthy have seen their share of the total income absolutely skyrocket.

Just look:

Image

That shows the fraction of the total wealth of the United States for JUST THE TOP ONE PERCENT OF EARNERS.
In 1980, the year before Reagan was elected, the TOTAL fraction of wealth for the top 1% of earners was around 10%. That's people making over $370,000 a year, an amount 99% of Americans will NEVER reach.
In 2007 that figure had reached nearly 25% of the total wealth.

Doesn't that sound fucking ridiculous to you? Especially since your money is worth far LESS than it was in 1980, and yet average wages are still at around the same level?

Isn't it obviously fair that wages should track inflation?

If I'm being totally honest, I don't care how that's determined, whether through policy/law, or through unions... But because the policy-makers are the ones currently attacking the unions, I think it's prudent to support unions now, so that better policy-makers can be elected, and this horrible nightmare from Reagan to Bush II to Tea Party idiocy can be pushed back to the dark corner it came from.

I say this as a Canadian because the American right-shift has affected Canada pretty dramatically for the last decade. Our current Prime Minister seems to be intentionally copying American-style right-wing policy (right down to the religious nutbaggery), and the right has taken over the populist vote up here... which shows that people can be convinced to do the exact opposite of what's in their best interest if you just scare them the right way. :balls:

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#16 Post by Hype » Thu Oct 09, 2014 7:41 pm

Worth watching (both this link and the documentary itself):

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#17 Post by MorningGlory123 » Fri Oct 17, 2014 4:44 pm

Pandemonium wrote:
Adurentibus Spina wrote:The standard corporate policy these days for entry-level positions is: never hire full-time, but try to get your part-timers to take full-time or higher equivalent hours and responsibilities. Deny overtime pay. Never promote to management from within.

These are, and have been, standard policies for a long time. One might think that if unions were given more support and more leverage, they could actually fight these things. But no, people repeat the stupid mantra "I'm just lucky to have a job." while they work for Wal-Mart for pennies without any hope of job security or real promotion.
So it's up to unions to pressure companies to inflate the pay for no-skill job positions to unrealistic levels versus employees bettering themselves by acquiring more marketable job skills and education and moving up or out to better jobs? Who gets employed at Walmart for example with the life plan of stocking shelves and ringing up customers and retiring on such wages in 20 - 40 years? And why is it Walmart's responsibility to provide wages, benefits and job security to unskilled employees that would go far beyond similar positions and skill levels at competing retailers?
Why do you deem the living wage unrealistic, and why have you seemingly decided that workers in low-skilled jobs aren't entitled to earn a comfortable living? You've just acknowledged the global trend to of outsourcing production to sweatshop countries, and the net effect of that is Western consumer-orientated job markets are heavily dominated by service sector jobs - which are poorly paid and low skilled, and often filled with people that have already aquired skills but are not being utilised by our economies. To expect workers to forknow what the whims of the wreckless, nonsensical and self-destructive market forces will be wanting sounds about as realistic as your 'why can't they just better themselves' contention - as if there are no obstacles to that - no limited supply of managerial roles to move up to - no context where employment opportunities are relentlessly worsening - no burgeoning fees for qualifications leading to record debt and so on. Have unions specifically said Walmart must do this alone, because that sounds like a clear strawman. Unions expect all mercenary businesses to fairly recompensate their workers, but they have to pick and choose their battles?

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#18 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 17, 2014 8:57 pm

Just FYI, it's not just shitty useless jobs that get outsourced... I know of drug companies that outsource their medical safety divisions, as well as manufacturing (and have gotten into trouble because of the latter). And these were non-union jobs in the first place. But stronger unions help unify the worker vote for fixing these kinds of issues.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#19 Post by Pandemonium » Fri Oct 17, 2014 10:07 pm

MorningGlory123 wrote:Why do you deem the living wage unrealistic, and why have you seemingly decided that workers in low-skilled jobs aren't entitled to earn a comfortable living? You've just acknowledged the global trend to of outsourcing production to sweatshop countries, and the net effect of that is Western consumer-orientated job markets are heavily dominated by service sector jobs - which are poorly paid and low skilled, and often filled with people that have already aquired skills but are not being utilised by our economies. To expect workers to forknow what the whims of the wreckless, nonsensical and self-destructive market forces will be wanting sounds about as realistic as your 'why can't they just better themselves' contention - as if there are no obstacles to that - no limited supply of managerial roles to move up to - no context where employment opportunities are relentlessly worsening - no burgeoning fees for qualifications leading to record debt and so on. Have unions specifically said Walmart must do this alone, because that sounds like a clear strawman. Unions expect all mercenary businesses to fairly recompensate their workers, but they have to pick and choose their battles?
You're kind of all over the map here but lemme pick through this....

"Why do you deem the living wage unrealistic, and why have you seemingly decided that workers in low-skilled jobs aren't entitled to earn a comfortable living?"

First off, what's the criteria of a living wage? What is a "realistic" living wage? For what kind of position? Who decides that... the employee, the employer, the government (local or federal)?

Do you think a burger flipper at Burger King should get $15 - $20 an hour + benefits? Is such a position a "lifetime" job that someone should be able to retire at after 30 years? Is it the employer's responsibility to pay this person "X" amount of dollars per hour/week regardless of the kind of employment position, the skills and education required? Plus, should it matter the employee's personal situation such as financial needs (say, single parent raising 3 kids)? The answer to all those questions is "No." This may be breaking news, but life... the world, even the good ol' USA is a tough place to make a decent living and you'll probably not find any other country where one can succeed better if you have the skills, education and drive. It's up to the individual, first and foremost to give themselves these tools and gain the eventual experience to be able to support themselves in whatever manner they see fit, not an employer. Someone doesn't like making $9 an hour at the call center spamming people about health insurance, move on, don't piss and moan that the boss should be paying you double.

"You've just acknowledged the global trend to of outsourcing production to sweatshop countries, and the net effect of that is Western consumer-orientated job markets are heavily dominated by service sector jobs - which are poorly paid and low skilled, and often filled with people that have already aquired skills but are not being utilised by our economies. To expect workers to forknow what the whims of the wreckless, nonsensical and self-destructive market forces will be wanting sounds about as realistic as your 'why can't they just better themselves' contention - as if there are no obstacles to that........"

OK, why have we (the US for the sake of argument) become a primarily service oriented economy? Because we've moved away from being a manufacturing/industrial economy which peaked during the 60's because countries like China have completely undercut our costs (although that trend may be slowly reversing). A good deal of that can be attributed to the "new global economy" that various administrations of the past 20 years have pushed for on behalf of big corporations looking for cheaper labor. Automation in many types of manufacturing globally has also drastically cut down the need for workers. You can't chase that problem by unrealistically increasing manufacturing wages, you price yourself out of the relevant industry. The down and dirty fact of the matter is, the marketplace determines what a business or company can charge and thus decide what their expenses can be for a product or service. My typical go-to example is Apple who thrives because people buy their products by the billions and they are able to manufacture those things at a ridiculously cheap price in China. No one seems to want to boycott Apple for a "made in America" product with higher paid blue collar positions.

We also now lag far behind many other countries in skilled engineering talent - everyone now goes to college to be a lawyer or medical professional, which is service-based. You can directly trace the drop in the former educated workforce with the rise in a service-based economy. You really can't export a "service" like you can manufactured goods. The answer isn't drastically raising wages in say, automotive plants and textile manufacturing, but investing in rebuilding our white collar technically skilled workforce via education and more opportunities in those relative industries. That's where the government should be focusing most of it's energy and money.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#20 Post by Pandemonium » Fri Oct 17, 2014 10:12 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:But stronger unions help unify the worker vote for fixing these kinds of issues.
I agree... to a point. But the way out for especially large companies if they feel too squeezed and they can get away with it is to just outsource or move overseas.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#21 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 17, 2014 10:24 pm

Pandemonium wrote:
Adurentibus Spina wrote:But stronger unions help unify the worker vote for fixing these kinds of issues.
I agree... to a point. But the way out for especially large companies if they feel too squeezed and they can get away with it is to just outsource or move overseas.
This is only as possible as it is because the corporations pay for politicians that ease legislation that allows them to do these sorts of things more and more (without continuing to pay taxes, etc...) And this is caused by weakening unions not being able to compete for votes anymore. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#22 Post by Hype » Tue Nov 11, 2014 12:49 pm

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicd ... ly-chart-2

We need a new Pete Seeger, I guess. (And it's not Tom Morello...)

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Re: Anti-union = Anti-middle class

#23 Post by Hype » Mon Nov 17, 2014 4:29 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magaz ... .html?_r=0
Welcome to the Failure Age!
By ADAM DAVIDSONNOV. 12, 2014
When you pull off Highway 101 and head into Sunnyvale, Calif., the first thing you notice is how boring innovation looks up close. This small Silicon Valley city, which abuts both Cupertino, the home of Apple, and Mountain View, the site of the Googleplex, is where Lockheed built the Poseidon nuclear missile. It’s where the forebear of NASA did some of its most important research and where a prototype for Pong debuted at a neighborhood bar. Countless ambitious start-ups — with names like Qvivr, Schoolfy, eCloset.me and PeerPal — appear in Sunnyvale every year. Aesthetically, though, the city is one enormous glass-and-stucco office park after another. Its dominant architectural feature, the five-story headquarters of Yahoo, a few minutes from Innovation Way, looks about as futuristic as a suburban hospital.

As an industry becomes more dynamic, its architecture, by necessity, often becomes less inspiring. These squat buildings have thick outer walls that allow for a minimal number of internal support beams, creating versatile open-floor plans for any kind of company — one processing silicon into solar-power arrays, say, or a start-up monitoring weed elimination in industrial agriculture. In Sunnyvale, companies generally don’t stay the same size. They expand quickly or go out of business, and then the office has to be ready for the next tenant. These buildings need to be the business equivalent of dorms: spaces designed to house important and tumultuous periods of people’s lives before being cleaned out and prepped for the next occupant.
Perhaps the best place to behold the Valley’s success as a platform for innovation is a 27,000-square-foot facility just down the block from Yahoo. This is the warehouse of Weird Stuff, a 21-person company that buys the office detritus that start-ups no longer want. One section of the space teems with hundreds of laptops and desktops; another is overloaded with C.P.U.s and orphaned cubicle partitions. “If founders are in a building that’s costing $50,000 a month, and they’ve lost their funding and have to be out by next Friday, we respond very quickly,” said Chuck Schuetz, the founder of Weird Stuff.

Weird Stuff also acquires goods from the start-ups that succeed, when they are ready to upgrade offices and need to offload their old equipment. “We get truckloads every day,” Schuetz told me. He said that he receives a lot of calls from government offices and large corporate-network operators who desperately need, for example, a 1981 Seagate ST506 hard drive in order to keep a crucial piece of equipment running. But much of his stuff is bought by new waves of start-ups in search of inexpensive keyboards or cubicle partitions. What doesn’t move is sold to scrap dealers. “This,” he said, gesturing to the giant scrap bin out back, “is where everything ends up.”

For decades, entrepreneurs and digital gurus of various repute have referred to this era, in a breathlessness bordering on proselytizing, as the age of innovation. But Weird Stuff is a reminder of another, unexpected truth about innovation: It is, by necessity, inextricably linked with failure. The path to any success is lined with disasters. Most of the products that do make it out of the lab fail spectacularly once they hit the market. Even successful products will ultimately fail when a better idea comes along. (One of Schuetz’s most remarkable finds is a portable eight-track player.) And those lucky innovations that are truly triumphant, the ones that transform markets and industries, create widespread failure among their competition.

An age of constant invention naturally begets one of constant failure. The life span of an innovation, in fact, has never been shorter. An African hand ax from 285,000 years ago, for instance, was essentially identical to those made some 250,000 years later. The Sumerians believed that the hoe was invented by a godlike figure named Enlil a few thousand years before Jesus, but a similar tool was being used a thousand years after his death. During the Middle Ages, amid major advances in agriculture, warfare and building technology, the failure loop closed to less than a century. During the Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution, it was reduced to about a lifetime. By the 20th century, it could be measured in decades. Today, it is best measured in years and, for some products, even less. (Schuetz receives tons of smartphones that are only a season or two old.)

The closure of the failure loop has sent uncomfortable ripples through the economy. When a product or company is no longer valued in the marketplace, there are typically thousands of workers whose own market value diminishes, too. Our breakneck pace of innovation can be seen in stock-market volatility and other boardroom metrics, but it can also be measured in unemployment checks, in divorces and involuntary moves and in promising careers turned stagnant. Every derelict product that makes its way into Weird Stuff exists as part of a massive ecosystem of human lives — of engineers and manufacturers; sales people and marketing departments; logistics planners and truck drivers — that has shared in this process of failure.

Innovation is, after all, terrifying. Right now we’re going through changes that rip away the core logic of our economy. Will there be enough jobs to go around? Will they pay a living wage? Terror, however, can also be helpful. The only way to harness this new age of failure is to learn how to bounce back from disaster and create the societal institutions that help us do so. The real question is whether we’re up for the challenge.

After a tour of Weird Stuff, Schuetz mentioned a purple chair that he kept among the office furniture piled haphazardly in the back of his facility. Unbeknown to him, that chair actually provides a great way to understand the acceleration of innovation and failure that began 150 years ago. In ancient times, purple chairs were virtually priceless. Back then, all cloth dyes were made from natural products, like flower petals or crushed rocks; they either bled or faded and needed constant repair. One particular purple dye, which was culled from the glandular mucus of shellfish, was among the rarest and most prized colors. It was generally reserved for royalty. Nobody had surplus purple chairs piled up for $20 a pop.

But that all changed in 1856, with a discovery by an 18-year-old English chemist named William Henry Perkin. Tinkering in his home laboratory, Perkin was trying to synthesize an artificial form of quinine, an antimalarial agent. Although he botched his experiments, he happened to notice that one substance maintained a bright and unexpected purple color that didn’t run or fade. Perkin, it turned out, had discovered a way of making arguably the world’s most coveted color from incredibly cheap coal tar. He patented his invention — the first synthetic dye — created a company and sold shares to raise capital for a factory. Eventually his dye, and generations of dye that followed, so thoroughly democratized the color purple that it became the emblematic color of cheesy English rock bands, Prince albums and office chairs for those willing to dare a hue slightly more bold than black.

Perkin’s fortuitous failure, it’s safe to say, would have never occurred even a hundred years earlier. In pre-modern times, when starvation was common and there was little social insurance outside your clan, every individual bore the risk of any new idea. As a result, risks simply weren’t worth taking. If a clever idea for a crop rotation failed or an enhanced plow was ineffective, a farmer’s family might not get enough to eat. Children might die. Even if the innovation worked, any peasant who found himself with an abundance of crops would most likely soon find a representative of the local lord coming along to claim it. A similar process, one in which success was stolen and failure could be lethal, also ensured that carpenters, cobblers, bakers and the other skilled artisans would only innovate slowly, if at all. So most people adjusted accordingly by living near arable land, having as many children as possible (a good insurance policy) and playing it safe.

Our relationship with innovation finally began to change, however, during the Industrial Revolution. While individual inventors like James Watt and Eli Whitney tend to receive most of the credit, perhaps the most significant changes were not technological but rather legal and financial. The rise of stocks and bonds, patents and agricultural futures allowed a large number of people to broadly share the risks of possible failure and the rewards of potential success. If it weren’t for these tools, a tinkerer like Perkin would never have been messing around with an attempt at artificial quinine in the first place. And he wouldn’t have had any way to capitalize on his idea. Anyway, he probably would have been too consumed by tilling land and raising children.

The secret of the corporation’s success was that it generally did not focus on truly transformative innovations.

Perkin’s invention may have brought cheap purple (and, later, green and red) dyes to the masses, but it helped upend whatever was left of the existing global supply chain, with its small cottage-size dye houses and its artisanal crafts people who were working with lichen and bugs. For millenniums, the economy had been built around subsistence farming, small-batch artisanal work and highly localized markets. Inventions like Perkin’s — and the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the telegraph, the Bessemer steel-production process — destroyed the last vestiges of this way of life.

The original age of innovation may have ushered in an era of unforeseen productivity, but it was, for millions of people, absolutely terrifying. Over a generation or two, however, our society responded by developing a new set of institutions to lessen the pain of this new volatility, including unions, Social Security and the single greatest risk-mitigating institution ever: the corporation. During the late 19th century, a series of experiments in organizational structure culminated, in the 1920s, with the birth of General Motors, the first modern corporation. Its basic characteristics soon became ubiquitous. Ownership, which was once a job passed from father to son, was now divided among countless shareholders. Management, too, was divided, among a large group of professionals who directed units, or “subdivisions,” within it. The corporation, in essence, acted as a giant risk-sharing machine, amassing millions of investors’ capital and spreading it among a large number of projects, then sharing the returns broadly too. The corporation managed the risk so well, in fact, that it created an innovation known as the steady job. For the first time in history, the risks of innovation were not borne by the poorest. This resulted in what economists call the Great Compression, when the gap between the income of the rich and poor rapidly fell to its lowest margin.

The secret of the corporation’s success, however, was that it generally did not focus on truly transformative innovations. Most firms found that the surest way to grow was to perfect the manufacturing of the same products, year after year. G.M., U.S. Steel, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola and other iconic companies achieved their breakthrough insights in the pre-corporate era and spent the next several decades refining them, perhaps introducing a new product every decade or so. During the period between 1870 and 1920, cars, planes, electricity, telephones and radios were introduced. But over the next 50 years, as cars and planes got bigger and electricity and phones became more ubiquitous, the core technologies stayed fundamentally the same. (Though some notable exceptions include the television, nuclear power and disposable diapers.)

Celebrated corporate-research departments at Bell Labs, DuPont and Xerox may have employed scores of white-coated scientists, but their impact was blunted by the thick shell of bureaucracy around them. Bell Labs conceived some radical inventions, like the transistor, the laser and many of the programming languages in use today, but its parent company, AT&T, ignored many of them to focus on its basic telephone monopoly. Xerox scientists came up with the mouse, the visual operating system, laser printers and Ethernet, but they couldn’t interest their bosses back East, who were focused on protecting the copier business.

Corporate leaders weren’t stupid. They were simply making so much money that they didn’t see any reason to risk it all on lots of new ideas. This conservatism extended through the ranks. Economic stability allowed millions more people to forgo many of the risk-mitigation strategies that had been in place for millenniums. Family size plummeted. Many people moved away from arable land (Arizona!). Many young people, most notably young women, saw new forms of economic freedom when they were no longer tied to the routine of frequent childbirth. Failure was no longer the expectation; most people could predict, with reasonable assurance, what their lives and careers would look like decades into the future. Our institutions — unions, schools, corporate career tracks, pensions and retirement accounts — were all predicated on a stable and rosy future.

We now know, of course, that this golden moment was really a benevolent blip. In reality, the failure loop was closing far faster than we ever could have realized. The American corporate era quietly began to unravel in the 1960s. David Hounshell, a scholar of the history of American innovation, told me about a key moment in 1968, when DuPont introduced Qiana, a kind of nylon with a silklike feel, whose name was selected through a computer-generated list of meaningless five-letter words. DuPont had helped to create the modern method of product development, in which managers would identify a market need and simply inform the research department that it had to produce a solution by a specific date. Over the course of decades, this process was responsible for successful materials like Freon, Lucite, Orlon, Dacron and Mylar. In Qiana, DuPont hoped that it had the next Lycra.

But not long after the company introduced Qiana to the market, it was met by a flood of cheap Japanese products made from polyester. Qiana, which only came close to breaking even during one year of sales, eventually sustained operating losses of more than $200 million. Similar shudders were felt in corporate suites across America, as new global competitors — first from Europe, then from Asia — shook up the stable order of the automotive and steel industries. Global trade narrowed the failure loop from generations to a decade or less, far shorter than most people’s careers.

For American workers, the greatest challenge would come from computers. By the 1970s, the impact of computers was greatest in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. Factory workers competed with computer-run machines; secretaries and bookkeepers saw their jobs eliminated by desktop software. Over the last two decades, the destabilizing forces of computers and the Internet has spread to even the highest-paid professions. Corporations “were created to coordinate and organize communication among lots of different people,” says Chris Dixon, a partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “A lot of those organizations are being replaced by computer networks.” Dixon says that start-ups like Uber and Kickstarter are harbingers of a much larger shift, in which loose groupings of individuals will perform functions that were once the domain of larger corporations. “If you had to know one thing that will explain the next 20 years, that’s the key idea: We are moving toward a period of decentralization,” Dixon says.

Were we simply enduring a one-time shift into an age of computers, the adjustment might just require us to retrain and move onward. Instead, in a time of constant change, it’s hard for us to predict the skills that we will need in the future. Whereas the corporate era created a virtuous cycle of growing companies, better-paid workers and richer consumers, we’re now suffering through a cycle of destabilization, whereby each new technology makes it ever easier and faster to create the next one, which, of course, leads to more and more failure. It’s enough to make us feel like mollusk-gland hunters.

Much as William Henry Perkin’s generation ripped apart an old way of life, the innovation era is sundering the stability of the corporate age. Industries that once seemed resistant to change are only now entering the early stages of major disruption. A large percentage of the health-care industry, for example, includes the rote work of recording, storing and accessing medical records. But many companies are currently devising ways to digitize our medical documents more efficiently. Many economists believe that peer-to-peer lending, Bitcoin and other financial innovations will soon strike at the core of banking by making it easier to receive loans or seed money outside a traditional institution. Education is facing the threat of computer-based learning posed by Khan Academy, Coursera and other upstart companies. Government is changing, too. India recently introduced a site that allows anybody to see which government workers are showing up for their jobs on time (or at all) and which are shirking. Similarly, Houston recently developed a complex database that helps managers put an end to runaway overtime costs. These changes are still new, in part because so many large businesses benefit from the old system and use their capital to impede innovation. But the changes will inevitably become greater, and the results will be drastic. Those four industries — health care, finance, education and government — represent well more than half of the U.S. economy. The lives of tens of millions of people will change.

In the corporate era, most people borrowed their reputations from large institutions. Now, our own personal reputations will matter more.

Some professions, however, are already demonstrating ways to embrace failure. For example, there’s an uncharacteristic explosion of creativity among accountants. Yes, accountants: Groups like the Thriveal C.P.A. Network and the VeraSage Institute are leading that profession from its roots in near-total risk aversion to something approaching the opposite. Computing may have commoditized much of the industry’s everyday work, but some enterprising accountants are learning how to use some of their biggest assets — the trust of their clients and access to financial data — to provide deep insights into a company’s business. They’re identifying which activities are most profitable, which ones are wasteful and when the former become the latter. Accounting once was entirely backward-looking and, because no one would pay for an audit for fun, dependent on government regulation. It was a cost. Now real-time networked software can make it forward-looking and a source of profit. It’s worth remembering, though, that this process never ends: As soon as accountants discover a new sort of service to provide their customers, some software innovator will be seeking ways to automate it, which means those accountants will work to constantly come up with even newer ideas. The failure loop will continue to close.

Lawyers, too, are trying to transform computers from a threat into a value-adding tool. For centuries the legal profession has made a great deal of money from drawing up contracts or patent applications that inevitably sit in drawers, unexamined. Software can insert boilerplate language more cheaply now. But some computer-minded lawyers have found real value in those cabinets filled with old contracts and patent filings. They use data-sniffing programs and their own legal expertise to cull through millions of patent applications or contracts to build never-before-seen complex models of the business landscape and sell it to their clients.

The manufacturing industry is going through the early stages of its own change. Until quite recently, it cost tens of millions of dollars to build a manufacturing plant. Today, 3-D printing and cloud manufacturing, a process in which entrepreneurs pay relatively little to access other companies’ machines during downtime, have drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new companies. Many imagine this will revitalize the business of making things in America. Successful factories, like accounting firms, need to focus on special new products that no one in Asia has yet figured out how to mass produce. Something similar is happening in agriculture, where commodity grains are tended by computer-run tractors as farming entrepreneurs seek more value in heritage, organic, local and other specialty crops. This has been manifested in the stunning proliferation of apple varieties in our stores over the past couple of years.

Every other major shift in economic order has made an enormous impact on the nature of personal and family life, and this one probably will, too. Rather than undertake one career for our entire working lives, with minimal failure allowed, many of us will be forced to experiment with several careers, frequently changing course as the market demands — and not always succeeding in our new efforts. In the corporate era, most people borrowed their reputations from the large institutions they affiliated themselves with: their employers, perhaps, or their universities. Our own personal reputations will now matter more, and they will be far more self-made. As career trajectories and earnings become increasingly volatile, gender roles will fragment further, and many families will spend some time in which the mother is a primary breadwinner and the father is underemployed and at home with the children. It will be harder to explain what you do for a living to acquaintances. The advice of mentors, whose wisdom is ascribed to a passing age, will mean less and less.

To succeed in the innovation era, says Daron Acemoglu, a prominent M.I.T. economist, we will need, above all, to build a new set of institutions, something like the societal equivalent of those office parks in Sunnyvale, that help us stay flexible in the midst of turbulent lives. We’ll need modern insurance and financial products that encourage us to pursue entrepreneurial ideas or the education needed for a career change. And we’ll need incentives that encourage us to take these risks; we won’t take them if we fear paying the full cost of failure. Acemoglu says we will need a far stronger safety net, because a society that encourages risk will intrinsically be wealthier over all.

History is filled with examples of societal innovation, like the United States Constitution and the eight-hour workday, that have made many people better off. These beneficial changes tend to come, Acemoglu told me, when large swaths of the population rally together to demand them. He says it’s too early to fully understand exactly what sorts of governing innovations we need today, because the new economic system is still emerging and questions about it remain: How many people will be displaced by robots and mobile apps? How many new jobs will be created? We can’t build the right social institutions until we know the precise problem we’re solving. “I don’t think we are quite there yet,” he told me.

Generally, those with power and wealth resist any significant shift in the existing institutions. Robber barons fought many of the changes of the Progressive Era, and Wall Street fought the reforms of the 1930s. Today, the political system seems incapable of wholesale reinvention. But Acemoglu said that could change in an instant if enough people demand it. In 1900, after all, it was impossible to predict the rise of the modern corporation, labor unions, Social Security and other transformative institutions that shifted gains from the wealthy to workers.

We are a strange species, at once risk-averse and thrill-seeking, terrified of failure but eager for new adventure. If we discover ways to share those risks and those rewards, then we could conceivably arrive somewhere better. The pre-modern era was all risk and no reward. The corporate era had modest rewards and minimal risks. If we conquer our fear of failure, we can, just maybe, have both.

Adam Davidson is a frequent contributor to the magazine and a founder of NPR’s “Planet Money.” He is working on a book about the future of the American economy for Knopf.

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2014, on page MM40 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Perdantoj Gajnas Losers Win. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

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