Wow! And all of this while they screwed the indigenous and kept the artists in poverty. Sounds like a stereotype Keith.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:12 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Ed Weick Subject: Re: [Futurework] Driving out the unions 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: Keith Hudson <mailto:[email protected]> To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION <mailto:[email protected]> ; Ed Weick <mailto:[email protected]> 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 Harold Meyerson <http://www.washingtonpost.com/harold-meyerson/2011/02/24/ABvsvmP_page.html> , Dec 12, 2012 01:35 AM EST The Washington Post <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> 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 " that don <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578161493858722884.h tml> 't 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 Party's 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 Michael Gerson <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-making-economic-advan cement-realistic/2012/11/19/ab926fae-3283-11e2-bfd5-e202b6d7b501_story.html> and David Brooks have acknowledged that workers' incomes seem to be stuck. What conservatives haven't 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. Roughly 100 million <http://prospect.org/article/if-labor-dies-whats-next> of the nation's 143 million employed workers <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm> have jobs that can <http://www.princeton.edu/~blinder/papers/07ceps142.pdf> 't be shipped abroad, that aren't 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 they've become dispensable. Yet while they can't be dispensed with, neither can they bargain for a raise. Today fewer than 7 percent <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm> of private-sector workers are union members. That figure may shrink a little more with new <http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/job-creation-debate-illustrates-voll ey-of-claims-over-right-to-work-as-michigan-decision-nears/2012/12/10/9f780f 72-4330-11e2-8c8f-fbebf7ccab4e_story.html> "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 state's economy by creating more jobs. But an exhaustive study <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1027987> 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 hasn <http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high- wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6> 't 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 labor's 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 Michigan's laws is more political than economic should consider the two kinds of unions exempted from its reach: police and firefighter unions <http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20121208/NEWS04/312080019/Right- work-bill-exempts-police-fire-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 Snyder's signature, Michigan becomes the second state in the once-heavily unionized, industrial Midwest <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/12/11/michigan-would-be -first-blue-right-to-work-state/?hpid=z1> 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 union's membership has shrunk to 381,000 <http://www.autoblog.com/2012/04/02/uaw-membership-climbs-1-1-thanks-to-auto makers-adding-jobs/> - roughly one-quarter of its size 35 years ago <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/uawm-a01.shtml> - 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 labor's power at election time. Doing so further diminishes the number of workers who can bargain for a raise. It's nice that conservatives are finally acknowledging that workers' incomes are stagnating. But workers don't get raises if they can't 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. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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