At 22:21 12/12/2012, EW wrote:
Well, yes. I spent thirty years in the Canadian
public service and was a member of a
professional union which was always there in the
background helping to ensure that I was getting paid more than I was worth.
Well, that's refreshing to hear! If Canada is
like the UK then there'll be a senior civil
service union (to which Ed would certainly have
belonged) above a much larger public service
union (the PCS). In the UK there's an even more
senior group of no more than 150 or so,
consisting of the administrative heads of the 15
or so departments ("Permanent Secretaries") plus
one or two levels below it, but no more. This
group has been able to give itself extraordinary
perks (that is, it doesn't ask the government or
parliament for them but quietly goes ahead on its
own). This has included foreign trips, membership
of exclusive London clubs, use of credit cards,
lavish golden handshakes,etc. When these perks
are discovered by the media and public anger
arises they're quickly and quietly retracted (as
though they never existed!). The latest dodge to
be exposed is for a senior civil servant to
retire early (picking up his inflation-linked
pension, of course), set up a private business
and then apply for (and get, of course!)
sub-contract work from his ex-department -- his
own old job, in fact. Corporation tax being much
lower than his income tax (from his pension and
his new sub-contract earnings) -- not to speak of
other fiddles his firm's accountant can arrange
-- he'll be immensely better off than previously.
All this came to light about a fortnight ago but
has now stopped. (My guess is that in most cases
this would have the effect of doubling his income
for a number of years before his full retirement age.)
Keith
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Keith Hudson
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>RE-DESIGNING
WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; <mailto:[email protected]>Ed Weick
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Driving out the unions
At 14:59 12/12/2012, EW wrote:
Unions used to be a very important part of the
economy. Increasingly, they no longer are.
Industrial unions, yes, but some unions are
still important! At least they are in the UK,
and those that have become closed shops by
acquiring special privileges from the government
and controlling their numbers can obtain high
incomes for their members. Barristers' Chambers,
solicitors' Law Society, doctors' British
Medical Association are examples of such. Also
there are groups which are self-selecting for
the purpose of boosting their incomes but which
don't have formal membership. One good example
of this (which applies in America, too) is the
amorphous group of senior banking executives
which gladly serve on the remuneration advisory
committees of competitive banks. This has
enabled them to artificially ratchet one
another's salaries upwards to astronomical
levels in recent years and, when, criticized,
can falsely claim "market rates".
Keith
Ed
The Lansing-Beijing connection
By
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/harold-meyerson/2011/02/24/ABvsvmP_page.html>Harold
Meyerson,
Dec 12, 2012 01:35 AM EST
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-unions-still-matter-in-michigan-just-as-in-china/2012/12/11/d77d9948-43c9-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions#license-d77d9948-43c9-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532>The
Washington Post Published: December 11
China has a problem: rising inequality. The gap
between profits and wages is soaring. Although
elements of the government have sought to boost
workers incomes, they have been thwarted by
major companies and banks
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578161493858722884.html>
that dont want to give more profit to the
country and let the government distribute it,
Qi Jingmei, a research fellow for a government
think tank, told the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, if China permitted the establishment
of unions, wages would rise. But for
fundamentally political reasons independent
unions would undermine the Communist Partys
authority unions are out of the question.
Meanwhile, the United States also has a problem
of a rising gap between profits and wages. The
stagnation of wages has become an accepted fact
across the political spectrum; conservative
columnists such as
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-making-economic-advancement-realistic/2012/11/19/ab926fae-3283-11e2-bfd5-e202b6d7b501_story.html>Michael
Gerson and David Brooks have acknowledged that
workers incomes seem to be stuck.
What conservatives havent acknowledged, and
what even most liberal commentators fail to
appreciate, is how central the collapse of
collective bargaining is to American workers
inability to win themselves a raise. Yes,
globalizing and mechanizing jobs has cut into
the livelihoods of millions of U.S. workers,
but that is far from the whole story.
<http://prospect.org/article/if-labor-dies-whats-next>Roughly
100 million of the nations
<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm>143
million employed workers have
<http://www.princeton.edu/~blinder/papers/07ceps142.pdf>jobs
that cant be shipped abroad, that arent in
competition with steel workers in Sao Paolo or
iPod assemblers in Shenzhen. Sales clerks,
waiters, librarians and carpenters all utilize
technology in their jobs, but not to the point
that theyve become dispensable.
Yet while they cant be dispensed with, neither
can they bargain for a raise. Today
<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm>fewer
than 7 percent of private-sector workers are
union members. That figure may shrink a little
more with
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/job-creation-debate-illustrates-volley-of-claims-over-right-to-work-as-michigan-decision-nears/2012/12/10/9f780f72-4330-11e2-8c8f-fbebf7ccab4e_story.html>new
right to work laws in Michigan the
propagandistic term for statutes that allow
workers to benefit from union contracts without having to pay union dues.
Defenders of right-to-work laws argue that they
improve a states economy by creating more
jobs. But an
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1027987>exhaustive
study by economist Lonnie K. Stevans of Hofstra
University found that states that have enacted
such laws reported no increase in business
start-ups or rates of employment. Wages and
personal income are lower in those states than
in those without such laws, Stevans concluded,
though proprietors incomes are higher. In
short, right-to-work laws simply redistribute income from workers to owners.
Why, then, are such laws being enacted? The gap
between U.S. capital income and labor income
<http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6>hasnt
been this great since before the New Deal; why
widen it still more? The answer, in Lansing no
less than in Beijing, is political. The
Republicans who took control of the Michigan
statehouse in 2010 understand that Democrats
foot soldiers come disproportionately from
labor. GOP efforts to reduce labors clout help
Republicans politically far more than they help
any Michigan-based businesses or local
governments. (The legislation, which Gov. Rick
Snyder (R) signed into law Tuesday evening,
establishes right-to-work requirements for the public sector, too.)
Those who doubt that the intent of Michigans
laws is more political than economic should
consider the two kinds of unions exempted from
its reach:
<http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20121208/NEWS04/312080019/Right-work-bill-exempts-police-fire-unions>police
and firefighter unions. Their contracts are
among the costliest that local governments
confront: Police and firefighters generally
(and rightly) retire earlier than do other
public employees, with relatively generous
pension benefits. But in Michigan, police and
firefighter unions often endorse Republicans.
Shrinking their treasuries and political power
by subjecting them to right-to-work strictures
would only damage Republicans electoral
prospects (and may well play poorly to voters).
With Snyders signature, Michigan becomes the
second state in the
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/12/11/michigan-would-be-first-blue-right-to-work-state/?hpid=z1>once-heavily
unionized, industrial Midwest to adopt such a
statute; hitherto, such laws had largely been
confined to states in the South, the Plains and
the Mountain West. The United Auto Workers
(UAW) was once the colossus of Michigan
politics, but the unions membership has shrunk
to
<http://www.autoblog.com/2012/04/02/uaw-membership-climbs-1-1-thanks-to-automakers-adding-jobs/>381,000
roughly
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/uawm-a01.shtml>one-quarter
of its size 35 years ago a casualty of
globalization and the legal and cultural
obstacles the UAW has encountered to organizing new members.
Michigan Republicans have seen a chance to
weaken the UAW and labors power at election
time. Doing so further diminishes the number of
workers who can bargain for a raise. Its nice
that conservatives are finally acknowledging
that workers incomes are stagnating. But
workers dont get raises if they cant bargain
collectively, and all the hand-wringing about
our rising rates of inequality will be so much
empty rhetoric unless we insist in Lansing
and Beijing on workers right to form powerful unions.
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