At 17:37 13/12/2012, EW wrote:
Not sure of where we're headed. We see a
growing gap between the income of the rich and
the poor. It's conventional to think of this in
terms of the capitalists screwing labour and it
may be partly that, but we also have to
recognize that some huge economic shifts are
taking place. The financial sector is growing
rapidly and a lot of money is being made by
manipulating securities behind closed doors;
May I suggest that the financial sector stopped
growing in 2008 and is still shedding labour in
their tens of thousands? For example, UBS decided
a month ago to get rid of 10,000 jobs and
finished the process this week with a batch of
2,000. The Swiss do it quite quaintly. Individual
staff don't know for sure they're going to be
affected until they arrive at their office one
morning and instead of being allowed to sit down
are given a paper bag with their personal possessions in it.
Keith
e financial sector is no longer growing rapidly.
It stopped, point blank, in 2008
some people have become very rich in places
like Silicon Valley by inventing things we now
take for granted and that help some people to
manipulate securities behind closed doors;
ships and planes can carry goods produced
cheaply elsewhere to domestic markets; assembly
lines consist as much or more of machines than
people. Unions were very important when a lot
of people were making things here and now and
the bosses were clearly identifiable, but given
the dynamics of the present global economy,
just who are the bosses they should be taking on and because of what?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>D & N
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>RE-DESIGNING
WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 11:40 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Driving out the unions
I know it is piddling but... Associations are
"professionals", unions are "societally" lower
and indicate those who work "physical" and
usually mindless jobs over "mental" jobs. I too
belonged to "associations" decades ago. And they
made certain I too was paid more than the work
was worth but that was a "professional" actor's
association and some of the profession made
egregious sums while others struggled
day-to-day. Not really the same as a union.
It is the bottom of the pyramid that is being
eroded. The middle has yet to notice the cracks forming around it.
D.
On 13/12/2012 6:22 AM, Ray Harrell wrote:
Wow! And all of this while they screwed the
indigenous and kept the artists in
poverty. Sounds like a stereotype Keith.
REH
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[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: <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/%7Eblinder/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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