Originally Posted by LessinSF (Post 516072)

Freeriders are the opposite of delusional. They are very rational.

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 516077)

weird- ferrets posted this AM, and that is the last post I see, but the summary say ggg just posted, and I can't see it- NVM now it is up.

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller (Post 516075)

Thread One: Unions.

In the summer of 1965, I came home from my freshman year in college. No summer job prospect. My parents dropped me off one morning in a small manufacturing/warehouse district on Long Island, told me to knock on doors and ask for a job. They said they would pick me up when I called from a phone booth (Phone booth?) with a job. On the 4th place I asked, I was told I could be a substitute for packers and order-pullers in a warehouse for glass containers. Each regular employee would take two weeks off in the summer, and I would do his job for those two weeks. I got to know those no-collar guys pretty well. World War II vets. They gave me a lot of crap about being a college boy. I went back to school in September.

Summer of 1966, I went back and worked at the same place.

The Teamsters organized the warehouse in the winter of 1966. The men I worked with raised my situation with the Teamsters, of their own volition, and asked that the business be allowed to hire one, and only one, student, as a summer replacement during the period from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That student would NOT have to pay union dues.

I worked there each summer until 1968. I'll never cross a union picket line, anywhere, ever.

Thread Two: Cars.

I am not a car guy. But I got very lucky with gently used hand-me-downs, and on a couple of occasions, a used car steal. A '59 Oldsmobile in 1969, which then went to my younger brother, and '62 T-Bird (a swing away steering wheel!) in 71. This was a golden era in American tuna boats.

I then went trough a lifetime of "compromise cars", of American manufacture with varying, and generally deteriorating, quality. Example: I confess to having owned two Dodge Caravans.

When it came to buying a car for my daughter, in 1994 I bought her a gray market European model 1976 Mercedes 280 the size of a garbage truck. The car was the same age as my daughter. She used and abused it for six years. My mechanic, a friend, literally waved me off as it billowed plumes of white smoke from the exhaust. I loved that old beast.

In 2012, I bought a six year old Mercedes SLK that my children will pry from my cold dead hands, or until I can no longer clamber out of it, whichever comes first.

Originally Posted by LessinSF (Post 516072)

Freeriders are the opposite of delusional. They are very rational.

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller (Post 516075)

Thread One: Unions.

In the summer of 1965, I came home from my freshman year in college. No summer job prospect. My parents dropped me off one morning in a small manufacturing/warehouse district on Long Island, told me to knock on doors and ask for a job. They said they would pick me up when I called from a phone booth (Phone booth?) with a job. On the 4th place I asked, I was told I could be a substitute for packers and order-pullers in a warehouse for glass containers. Each regular employee would take two weeks off in the summer, and I would do his job for those two weeks. I got to know those no-collar guys pretty well. World War II vets. They gave me a lot of crap about being a college boy. I went back to school in September.

Summer of 1966, I went back and worked at the same place.

The Teamsters organized the warehouse in the winter of 1966. The men I worked with raised my situation with the Teamsters, of their own volition, and asked that the business be allowed to hire one, and only one, student, as a summer replacement during the period from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That student would NOT have to pay union dues.

I worked there each summer until 1968. I'll never cross a union picket line, anywhere, ever.

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller (Post 516082)

The concept of some form of an international labor union for unskilled workers isn't viable. Too many workers willing to work at subsistence wages because the alternative is not to subsist.

And if by chance a stable rising class of unskilled labor takes a foothold and union formation is viable, those jobs can be shipped to....now what is the word I'm looking for??....oh, yes... a shithole country. The ability to shift production anywhere to on the globe isn't going away.

Too many forms of governments around the world vehemently oppose the concept of labor unions. In states where the government is the final arbiter of what organizations are permitted...China and Russia being examples...the government claims to speak for labor, and an independent labor movement is viewed as a threat. In hard left socialist states, .... what's left of them... the same is true. Go ahead and start a union in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the like. Those countries will squash an independent labor movement like a cockroach.

Labor unions now seem to work best in democratic, mixed socialist/capitalist societies where there are other factors that bind the country together. One of those factors, like it or not, is often ethnic homogenesis...or tribalism, if you will. I'm not saying that is necessarily a good thing, but it appears to me to be true.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 516083)

The key is that there is absolutely nothing that makes an hour of work in the Philippines worth less than an hour of work in China, and an hour of work in China worth about the same as an hour of work in Mississippi, and an hour of work in Mississippi worth half what an hour of work in Massachusetts is worth.

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller (Post 516085)

There is a difference. "Worth" isn't the issue. That difference is the bedrock of economics: supply and demand. In the low level economies, the labor supply of fungible "work units" is plentiful. If you don't show up for work, there are a slew of your peers who would work for a wage sufficient to buy food for that day. And the supply chain for the finished products can be falsified to show that each pair of pants was sewn and assembled by happy workers who sing during their tea and yoga breaks, instead of by child workers who are abused.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 516086)

The determination of demand, however, is based in part on the level of the wage base.

Ultimately, we will head for a unified global labor market. We are already approaching a world in which the disparities within countries based on the urban / rural divide are often more significant than the barriers among countries' core urban areas.

I suspect what we are seeing now is the dying spasms of the old "first world" economies as they transition to a new order. The real question is going to be what that order looks like, and I think Trump's answer is "China".

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 516087)

Trump and other recent political trends are reversing the trend towards a unified global labor market.

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller (Post 516085)

There is a difference. "Worth" isn't the issue. That difference is the bedrock of economics: supply and demand. In the low level economies, the labor supply of fungible "work units" is plentiful. If you don't show up for work, there are a slew of your peers who would work for a wage sufficient to buy food for that day. And the supply chain for the finished products can be falsified to show that each pair of pants was sewn and assembled by happy workers who sing during their tea and yoga breaks, instead of by child workers who are abused.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 516088)

I have no doubt that is the goal.

But usually arguing with markets is little better than pissing into the wind.