jerseyhoya wrote:About 7% of private sector workers are unionized today. The labor movement has made tons of important contributions to American society, but for the most part these contributions are baked into the status quo at this point.

jerseyhoya wrote:Taxpayers take on the financial burden of management/shareholders in negotiations with public sector unions without having a seat at the table.

mozartpc27 wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:About 7% of private sector workers are unionized today. The labor movement has made tons of important contributions to American society, but for the most part these contributions are baked into the status quo at this point.

As the union movement recedes from the private sector, its gains are gradually rolled back: witness the replacement of pensions with the far more risky 401ks, the slow creep of the work week back up for most folks well above 40 hours a week, the increase in so-called "exempt" positions that require hours worked above the supposedly required limit with no additional compensation at all, let alone overtime. Workers pay more for their health insurance with each passing year, and get less. If there were no unions at all, you can bet your bottom dollar all these trends would continue, and new and worse ones would appear.

jerseyhoya wrote:Taxpayers take on the financial burden of management/shareholders in negotiations with public sector unions without having a seat at the table.

Monkeyboy wrote:They want to turn the clock way back to a time before unions when people worked in terribly unsafe conditions for little pay and no future or chance for advancement. Zero upward mobility would give Mitt an eternal boner. Heck, maybe they can even put kids back to work.

dajafi wrote:I wrote earlier today about how the economic super-elite has detached from the rest of us over recent decades. Production is way, way up; returns to the tippy-top are way, way up; median real wages are slightly up, flat, or slightly down based on the time frame you're looking at. None of this is good, and all of it correlates to the slow death of the labor movement

pacino wrote:Corporate profits and money on hand are higher than ever. Productivity is up. Wages and benefits are completely stagnant. Yep, pensions are the issue.

In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today.

* * *

Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t.

In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interest.”

In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors.

jeff2sf wrote:No, you don't get it. All you do is post self-righteous #$!&@ about how obvious your opinion is the correct one. And you get your opinion validated by like liberals such as mozart,monkeyboy, doll is mine.

Maybe step out into the world and talk to conservatives who aren't knuckle draggers once in a while.