Helloooo, I just spent an entire year working directly with primary materials related to labor history in the industrial core of the country, full time, as a job! You can make the short memory argument if you'd like to, but it doesn't apply to me and probably doesn't apply to most of your audience.
Well, I really didn't think it was, which is why I was kind of surprised by your last statement!
You've got a particularly rosy view of unions' roles in things,
I said the "labor movement", not "unions" per say, and I don't define "union" as the formal organization which collects dues, but rather a collection of workers sticking together to balance the power differential between any one of them alone and the boss. The Union, capital, that you are talking about has arisen as the defacto form that takes.
While on the whole I agree that unions were a main driver for the dramatic improvement in working conditions in 1870-1940, you're leaving out a few pretty huge drawpacks that I think lend a little more nuance to the period.
While I am curios what drawbacks during that period you are referring to are, I wasn't meaning to imply that everything workers do is admirable and beyond reproach, just that organized labor has a valuable role to play in society.
You're ignoring the effects of journalism and works like Sinclair's The Jungle.
Wasn't trying to do a thorough history of American labor laws.
You're not mentioning all the organized violence committed by unions and their members as part of their strikes in the gilded age,
The violence was both ways. Would we deny the overall positive effect of our role in WWII on the grounds that our soldiers were violent? I am aware of it, I just didn't see the relevance to the discussion
Your statements have part of the truth in them, but it's certainly not the whole truth.
fair enough.
And even setting all of that aside: the fact that labor unions have done great things does not earn them a perpetual right to 10% of the salary of the lower class! If labor unions are not performing any service of value today, why do they continue to collect their dues?
Why do police and firemen collect salaries even on days there are no crimes and no fires?
I think the 10% question is valid, but separate from whether or not the need for organized labor has become obsolete.
We've had an indisputable plummet in the strength of labor unions, and employment practices have not worsened along with it.
well, during that same time period (1970s- to now), while GDP has risen consistently, and the CEOs and stock holders of corporations (those who own the means of production), have increased even more quickly, median real wages have stagnated, particularly that of the working class, and the average wealth of the poor has actually decreased. I submit that the decline in worker organization may be one factor in that change. Partially due to peoples feeling that company/employee conflicts have been "solved" by labor laws, making unions unnecessary, partially by corporations undermining labor via corporate consolidation, outsourcing, and automation. If you need less workers to get the same amount of work done, workers lose their strength in numbers. These sort of moves are all facilitated by the excess capital available to the largest corporations (which brings it all back to the original thread topic)
We could also look between peer firms in the same industry: Do Giant Eagle workers really work under worse conditions or crueler policies than Kroger workers? What about Honda plant workers compared to their UAW peers? On a larger scale, you could also do so between nations: do the Germans (participation rate 19%) live oppressive working lives compared to their Finnish neighbors (participation rate 70%), who otherwise live in a pretty comparable society? In each case, controlling as closely as possible for everything but labor unions suggests that they aren't earning their keep.
The fact that any workforce is unionized helps raise average salary throughout the industry, just like how one store with discounted prices drives down prices for the same product everywhere. Even so, average salary at Giant Eagle: $25k. At Kroger: $34k
http://www.indeed.com/salary/Giant-Eagle.htmlhttp://www.indeed.com/salary/Kroger.htmlDifferent cultures have different ideas of the proper balance between economic growth and wealth equality. The executives at the big three are given salaries from 10 to 20 times as high as Japanese manufactures.
Germany was once 1/2 communist, and the two main parties are Christians, and Socialists, so they are, as a culture, less likely to attempt to take advantage of workers. Even so, Germany is 30 nations below Finland on the list of income equality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribution_of_wealthYou're dramatically oversimplifying it by painting it as a contest with Democrats, unions, and virtue on one side and Republicans, Wally World, and greed on the other.
lol, I could see how it might seem that way, but I didn't mention Democrats at all. I wouldn't put them in the "virtue" category. I mentioned Republicans because they are
explicitly anti-union, anti-labor, anti-regulation. Their candidate was Mitt Romney for cryin out loud!
I'm not talking about citizens who vote republican, I'm talking about the politicians themselves.
The cumulative effect of choosing low prices over American made, or Union, or local, or handcrafted, is to encourage outsourcing, automation, and corporate consolidation, all of which drives unemployment, and in turn depresses real wages. If these same things were happening on a micro level, within one town, the cause and effect would be obvious. It should be no less obvious on a global scale, but since it is dilute, we can collectively pretend it has to do with market bubbles or government spending or interest rates or whatever.
If low prices are driving an increase in unemployment, aren't real wages buoyed back to their prior level by the decrease in the price level? If not, you're positing some sort of murky multiplier effect that you haven't mentioned -- do you have support for the existence of such a multiplier?
That would only be true if 100% of the savings the corporation gained from outsourcing, etc went to lowering prices. They don't. Some percentage of it gets skimmed off to expand the business further, and to pay executive salaries and stock dividends. That's why wealth inequality has increased so dramatically over the past few decades. It is complex, and there isn't the direct cause and effect relationship I am implying, but these things are all correlated, and the trends line up.