You are probably right about the financial sector's growth having slowed for
the time being but it still continues to be a very important part of the
overall economy and, in my opinion, it will become even stronger. Countries
have accumulated huge fiscal debts that they can't eliminate by taxation. They
will have to continue to borrow, new debt replacing and exceeding old debt.
Individuals and families have also accumulated large debts. Business
borrowings will also continue. A thought that I find disturbing is that the
financial sector may have become the core of the economy in terms of the power
and influence it can exercise.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2012 6:39 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Driving out the unions
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: D & N
To: 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: [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
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; 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 Harold Meyerson,
Dec 12, 2012 01:35 AM EST
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 " that
don'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 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 of the
nation's 143 million employed workers have jobs that can'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 of private-sector workers are union members.
That figure may shrink a little more with 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 state's
economy by creating more jobs. But an 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 hasn'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. 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 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 - roughly
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 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.
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