Re: We are all Slave now.
 

My view of this is that there was a massive strategic mistake made by labor organizations and their leadership coming out of WW2, which was to protect their national markets rather than expand their membership internationally. By the 60s the mistake was clear but pretty hard to reverse, especially as US policy started to favor giving access to "our" multinationals to local non-union markets (and we even encouraged countries to set up enterprise zones that often protected multinationals from local unions and workforce rules) and it's just gotten worse.

Many of our multinational trade deals under Obama were starting to build in significant protections for unions in our trading partners. It's a step, but just one of many needing to be taken.

By the way, wages are rising very rapidly in all those places work got farmed out to. Those places are becoming important consumers and not just competitive producers.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm sympathetic to your point, but if I might go meta for a moment...

Think of labor as "sweat capital." If a company needs labor, it should be compelled to acquire that sweat capital under the same terms it would acquire liquid capital.

In regard to liquid capital, it can sell shares or take on debt. It usually does both. In the former instance, it dilutes the value of its shares. In the latter, it must pay interest. These are costs. And in terms of debt, those costs are what the market can get away with charging the corp. If the bank doesn't like the credit risk, it may charge the corporation through the nose.

Labor should be able to charge the corporation for sweat capital at whatever cost the providers of such sweat capital can extract. But the only way sweat capital can increase its value, to give it negotiating power equivalent to providers of liquid capital, is by compelling all providers of such capital into a pool. If individuals are able to opt out, the providers of sweat capital are placed at a structural disadvantage.

I don't like the idea of forcing anyone to pay dues to anybody else. But as a pragmatist, and one who believes that unions are necessary "sweat capital aggregators" without which inequality will further soar, I see zero economic benefit in this decision.

Yes, I'm allowing economics to trump law here. But this decision is enabling a "race to the bottom" we can hardly afford. If we eviscerate the middle class's purchasing power much further, we're going to soon reach two ugly realities:

1. Nobody will have any retirement savings because of the divergence between wages and increasing costs of living (particularly where Trump is starting a trade war that's going spike inflation);
2. These companies that have abused their leverage over the providers of "sweat capital" will have no one to sell their products to in this country.

Unions may often be run by corrupt and piggish management. But union wages for the guys who actually provide the sweat capital are a very necessary component of our economy's purchasing capacity. Too often, we confuse the two.

Remember somewhere, our union’s sewing*
 

To be honest, I had forgotten that we were talking about public sector unions (which I view very differently from private sector unions), but my point stands. I’m no more hating on individual workers who don’t want to be included in, and help pay to negotiate, a collective bargaining agreement than I am when talking about childless people complaining about school district taxes or homeowner association members complaining about everyone using the same guy to mow their lawns.

And it’s interesting to me that people on a internet bulliten board thingy started to negotiate in a way for uniform and higher employee wages would argue that collective action is bad.

And we all paid for that service by having to see ads on our Yahoo and Infirm pages. IIRC, no one (not even Know Won) argued that they should get the benefit of the board without having to see any ads.

*Still a great song.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Minimum wage and unionization are each tools. There are other tools too - like having employee representation on boards, for example, something I deal with in Europe that drives American corporate leadership bonkers but that they just accept and work with.

The key is the imbalance. If you don't find tools to fix the imbalance, and leave SEC to separately negotiate her wages for commodity work like union-bashing with Mega-corp., SEC will end up working for squat and riding a bicycle instead of driving a car. And as we all know, bikes suck (hi Adder!).

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I said this back in 2008: Until emerging market labor costs approach domestic labor costs, we will shed jobs and wages will lag. Hardly revelatory, I know. But worth repeating.

Investors see a timeline emerging where they'll have another 40 or so years to exploit cheap foreign labor (including frontier markets) while creating consumers as emerging markets become developed economies.

They're leaving the American consumer behind. They don't care about him. They figure he's fucked, and there'll be some populism, maybe some socialism, at home. But the CEOs' bet remains:

I can keep depressing labor costs domestically (to the extent I must have them at all), arbitraging labor costs abroad, and developing new consumers abroad to eclipse those I'm losing domestically.

This gets incredibly ugly in the next twenty years. Trump is but an hors d'oeuvre.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Maybe cap the union dues so no one will ever pay more in union dues than their income is increased by getting paid union wages.

Oh, wait, that's a meaningless limit, isn't it?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It'll be more than 40 years, because places like Tennessee actually want to compete with Hanoi. Their idea is to get wages low enough and working conditions bad enough so the work will come pouring back....

Trump is willing to help.

Re: Remember somewhere, our union’s sewing*
 

gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Auto jobs disappeared because foreign firms simply made better cars.

The unions and the automakers got lazy and built shit cars. People decided to buy foreign.

I don't recall my family buying a Volvo in the 80s because the American alternative was too expensive. They bought it because it was safer and ran longer.

I can buy cheap American cars all day long. I buy foreign because they last longer. I pay a premium for that. If American cars ran nearly as long as foreign cars, I'd pay that premium to American workers. But they do not, even now.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Oddly, this leaves open the possibility that having a few billion people enter the market will shrink its total size in dollar terms. Which may well happen.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

That's true. And very creepy.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

In the old days, this would play out over the decades as:

Trade war>Cold war>Regional war>World war

But I think trade has connected us too much for this to occur. Credit the architects of modern trade policy after WWII for that.

So now, with Trump the Dinosaur running a mercantilist policy, I think it'll go:

Trade war>Global recession>Further emphasis on cheap labor exploitation and automation>Further job loss and wage stagnation>Giant fucking societal mess

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Auto jobs died in the 70s. By the 80s it was catch up in Detroit. And people who bought Volvo’s were rich to begin with and at best happy to finally have an excuse to buy European- you should have seen Ford execs smiling when they bought Jaguar and could finally drive a fun car. But what killed the big 3 was Nissan and Datsun. And it included quality, sure, but even after the US tried to address quality, without the artificial bump from “US only” they could not sustain the wages. I was living in Detroit watching my family’s future disappear, working in the factories. I know what happened.

Oh God, save history, God, save your mad parade Oh Lord God, have mercy
 

yeah, and suppose RT tried to bill us to pay for the "services" ty provides as an admin?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Ah, yes, the 740 sedan -- pinnacle of luxury it was. I fondly recall the days Cartie, Ferris, and I would take it to the summer cottage in Rhinebeck. Badminton, croquet, and key parties with the cousins.

I believe that was the sedan Auth Ethel drove through the hedge maze. She was such a card.

I think I lost my virginity in that car, up there! Ah, Candace... Haven't seen her since the 2014 reunion.