In a card-check unionization drive, the employees sign their names on the cards. From Liberal’s link:
ETA: Wow, yet another reason to support Obama; I wasn’t aware of this trumping of card-check unionizing thingie. Time to change it.
He’s talking about the card check process. Its rather long, so here’s some good info instead:
In essence, the Card Check is like a Caucus. The Secret Ballot is like an actual election.
Aren’t both in payment of some debt? You commit a minor crime you preform community service to pay your “debt to society” I have no problem with public service to earn a better education. I prefer workfare to welfare as well. When my Dad had trouble paying property taxes he went to work part time for the town.
I find the discussion here extremely interesting. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping for in the Equality vs. Freedom thread. It seems to me that the ideals of personal liberty are great but have problems in practical application in the real world.
We can’t really address the issues of less taxes and less government without looking at cooperate greed and economic manipulation at the same time. The ideals of free market may sound great but I don’ think they adequately address those issues. Can we realistically separate economic principles like free market from things like corruption and greed?
Don’t you suppose we can find examples of suffering in our current system? Is either side claiming that there’s a system that eliminates problems?
Campaign finance reform and addressing the serious lobbying problem is one of the things Obama talks about changing. I’m willing to give him the opportunity to try. If he’s blowing smoke I’ll let him know what I think about that as well.
As long as we continue to have dialog and we can continue to examine programs for efficiency the solutions are there for us to discover and implement. That’s a freedom that is not being infringed upon.
The goal is not to punish people for success and take their money but to find a balance that moves *our * society forward , which happens to include all economic classes. A free market can’t solve those problems unless we work to actually make it free. That can mean less government regulations but it must also mean businesses not seeking government favors to improve their profitably but rather to offer something of real value to earn a profit.
Or maybe it’s citizens who are wondering if their fellow citizens and elected leaders are concerned enough to lend a helping hand when they need one.
admirable.
I have seen how welfare can encourage dependency , a feeling of entitlement, and encourage a lack of motivation by removing consequences for bad choices. I’ve seen housing for low income families make those who build it rich on the taxpayers dime.
I remember my Dad telling me when we were struggling it never occurred to him to ask for a handout. He just worked hard at a second job and we did without frills
I admire personal integrity. A lack of integrity crosses the class lines. As long as some businesses are willing to exploit the system for profit it seems proper to extend a helping hand to some of the exploited as we continue to try and work things out.
You could move to some superior place that is more in line with your ideals couldn’t you? I don’t think it’s a question of moral superiority. It’s a question of trying to discover where the lines are drawn and redrawing them as needed. In reading your posts I think I would agree with you on principles but disagree in how those principles are practically applied in the real world.
I categorically refuse to accept the notion that a citizen is in debt to a country in the sense that the country can compel him or her to serve. The notion that, because I live in a society that has a public component of the economy, I must be forced into service within it. In fact, this is one of the strongest arguments for libertarianism - that once government gives you a ‘service’, you will have your rights restricted in turn. There’s a quid pro quo. It doesn’t happen overnight, but as governments fail to provide services or costs rise, pressure arises to force the citizenry to get into line to help the books balance.
I predicted this would happen when health care was socialized, and it has. It’s one of the most common arguments you hear from those who want to make smoking illegal, or institute fat taxes, or force restaurants to offer healthier food, or to outlaw or heavily regulate risky activities. The argument goes, “hey, I help pick up the cheque for your health care. Therefore, I have a right to tell you what you can do with your own body. 'Cause if you break it, it’s costs me.”
“Hey, I helped pay for your kid’s education, so he can damned well pick trash off the streets for a summer. So I’m putting a gun to your head. Cough up the kid.”
This makes everyone in society owner and controller of everyone else. It makes us risk averse, and makes us more critical of each others’ actions. The flipside of communitarianism is a society built on mutual resentment and constant battles for control of the government so that the other side can be made to pay its ‘fair share’.
I strongly believe in equality. I just don’t believe in the same equality that you do. My version of equality says that we are all born free people - each with our own circumstances, our own gifts and our own weaknesses. We are free to live our lives how we see fit, so long as we don’t coerce anyone else. I am free to rise as far as my gifts will take me - and as low as my weaknesses will take me.
This ultimate freedom of action leads, in my opinion, to a world where people freely trade with each other out of mutual self interest. Where personal charity becomes more important than charity from a faceless bureaucrat.
That’s equality.
The other version of equality is more like, “We are all born in a community. Some of us have more gifts than others. They are not equal. Therefore, equality should be imposed by distributing the goods of society equally, or at least more equitably. Society should expect tithes from you, and in return provide communal goods like health care and care for seniors and the poor. If you have more gifts than someone else, we will expect you to contribute more.”
That version of ‘equality’ turns the concept on its head.
Why not? Where do you think ‘corporate greed’ is destroying the market? Can you give some examples?
I work for a very greedy corporation. It’s always pushing everyone in it to work harder, and smarter. It’s constantly evaluating the competition and working feverishly to take their market share from them. I attend quarterly meetings where we are treated to slide after slide of financial projections and plans for taking market away from competitors and making more money. The bottom line is everything.
Is this a bad thing? Not on your life. It’s this drive and dedication to making money that makes companies provide better products and accept lower profit margins. The plans in the meetings invariably revolve around the next versions of our products and how much we’ve improved them.
‘Corporate Greed’ is the unseen bogeyman that everyone knows is wrecking the country, but no one can say how or where. Aside from the rare Enron or Global Crossing (and in a 20 trillion dollar economy with hundreds of thousands of businesses in it, such operations are rare).
But even if you accept that there is some corporate shenanigans going on at some level, how in the world can you possibly trust government to fix it? If you have evidence that some businessmen are corrupt, surely there’s a hundred times more evidence that governments are far more corrupt, and far less efficient. Going to government for help is like going to the mob for help with a school bully.
The American government is corrupt from top to bottom. Gerrymandering has made it next to impossible to get rid of bad politicians - Congress’s approval rating is hovering below 20% right now, and over 90% of incumbents will be re-elected. There are financial scandals on an almost monthly basis. Influence peddling is completely accepted now as ‘earmarking’. These are people who vote for bills they haven’t read, and who spend so much time chasing financing that they don’t bother doing their jobs. I wouldn’t let them babysit my dog, and I damned sure wouldn’t want them treating my mother’s illnesses.
I’m perfectly aware that suffering exists in every healthcare system. I’m not the one under the illusion that government can remove it. If you don’t have the resources, you can’t re-arrange them in a way that everyone gets what they want.
My opposition to public health care is more basic - I don’t think you or I have the right to tell the guy down the street who went to medical school and worked his ass off that now he must be a servant of the state. Oh, we’ll pay him enough money to keep him from running away, but we’re going to tell him who he can treat, and how much he can be paid, and which drugs he must not use to treat his patients, and what kind of treatment he can offer. He doesn’t owe me that. Likewise, if he is willing to be hired to fix someone’s ailment, and someone offers to hire him, I have no right to step in between and tell him that he can’t accept the job.
I also don’t believe it works well. But that’s beside the point - I’d oppose it even if it did work as well, on philosophical grounds.
Some people always think that government will be ‘fixed’ just as soon as their guy gets into power or a few ‘good government laws’ are passed. You can no more fix government of corruption than you can eliminate a black market with laws. Trillions of dollars pass through the government’s hands. With that kind of money comes power, and with that kind of power comes corruption. If a Senator can, with a stroke of his pen, save a company billions of dollars or cost it billions of dollars, that company is far more likely to become corrupt, as is the Senator. They will begin to collude, and then your problem of greedy business will really be a problem.
This isn’t theoretical. It happens all the time. As does ‘regulatory capture’, in which businesses manipulate the regulatory regime to their benefit. Look at what the RIAA is doing. Look at how many bills get injected to the benefit of the entertainment industry. Copyright extensions, restrictions on fair use, the DMCA, etc. No surprise that the entertainment industry is the #1 lobbyist in the government.
Why you think this is less of a problem than ‘corporate greed’ is beyond me.
How’s that examination for efficiency working out in the education system? Are costs dropping? Is quality improving? Here in Canada, the health care system is getting steadily more expensive and services are going steadily down.
And what you’re missing is that there is no ‘fix’ for government inefficiency. And that’s because the root of that inefficiency is the incompetence of government and the lack of information you need to effectively control the economy. You simply can’t efficiently manage a modern economy from the top down. It’s impossible. The economy has spontaneous order created from the bottom up. Trying to push it from the top down is like poking jello with a stick - you may make a dent where you pushed, but there will be all these other bulges and waves as a result off the push, and they’re unpredictable and you didn’t intend them. So you try to push those bulges down, an more appear elsewhere. But if you let go, it’ll jiggle a bit and return to a stable form.
Wow. That analogy went a lot further than I intended it to… Must be the cough syrup I drank.
If there are fewer government regulations, there will be fewer businesses trying to take advantage of government. It’s the power that corrupts. Take away the power, and the corruption will go with it.
The ability to move is exactly why I think that the power of government to compel your behaviour should diminish as the government’s scope widens. I’m quite free to move to another city if my city steps out of line. So I will tolerate quite a lot of intrusion by my civic government. It’s somewhat harder to move to a different province (both in terms of cost and effort, but also in being distanced from your community and family), so I will tolerate significantly less intrusion in my life from my provincial government. And finally, I may not be free at all to leave my country, so the federal government should have very limited powers to control my life.
That’s the fundamental reason why federalism is so important in the U.S., and why conservatives and libertarians are advocates of states’ rights and so skeptical of the federal government. The default should always be that the control over your life be better exerted by the state you live in, or by yourself. The federal government should be agency of last resort, and only when critical needs must be met.
Maybe you do not want to see a state by state poll.
Sam, I will have to ask you for a cite for all of this information on Wal-Mart. I checked the Forbes Lists – all of them that I could find. Wal-Mart is definitely not on any I saw – not even on the top 400 List. I also checked Fortune’s List. Nope.
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Sam: Sam Stone: What Liberals never seem to understand is that you cannot have economic control and Liberty at the same time. My ability to live free depends on my ability to earn my own money and keep it. If it is taken by the state and then doled out under their ‘plan’, I’m no longer free - I’m a serf. If I work for ten years to save an investment, and then Obama comes along and takes 15% of it away from me, he has curtailed my freedom just as much as if he had forced me to go to work and spend 15% of my time doing his bidding. You cannot have true freedom without economic freedom.
Tell that to the Scandanavians. But you’d better hurry. Many of them will be leaving for their annual five weeks of vacation the first of July. Tell them their not free…
I recently watched the move “The high cost of low prices” concerning Wal MArt. Granted the film makers are biased against WM, but Wal MArt also wages a PR campaign to create a positive image.
Because of ther hourly wage many Wal MArt employees can’t afford the health insurance offered and managers encourage them to enroll in public assitance programs. They also have a reputation for pressuring employees to work off the clock and managers pressured into altering time sheets to insure those that have worked over 40 hours don’t get overtime.
Business is business and companies often have to make difficult choices. As a retail manager I see it all the time. Other than what Wal Mart does that is illegal I don’t see them as an evil cooperation. It’s largely our own uneducated choices that hurt us. It’s sad when a small family business that has been in the neighborhood for decades is pushed out of business when Wal Mart comes to town, but honestly it’s the fault of the shoppers themselves more than WM. They value saving a few dollars more than supporting their neighborhood businessman.
IMHO as long as we have the right to give voice to our complaints and vote to change things our freedom is not curtailed by taxes. The whole serf thing is a philosphical point that doesn’t hold up for me. If it’s agreed that taxes are necessary for certain functions and some regulations are needed then after that we’re merely examining and redefining where the lines are drawn as things change within our society. We have to do that based on current realities rather than philosophic ideals.
It’s the nature of our leaders and the vigilance of the citizens that shape our society. We got where we are with lousy leaders and by paying too little attention.
So did you vote for or against the war in Iraq? Did you vote for or against Soviet-style wiretapping? Did you vote for or against tax cuts for the wealthy?
I’m just glad that it’s you, and not I, who is defending a system that has gotten us in this shape.
What does my voting have to do with what I wrote?
you mean the system called democracy?
Ok, that’s cute. Ridiculous and irrelevant, but cute.
“IMHO as long as we have the right to give voice to our complaints and vote to change things our freedom is not curtailed by taxes.” — You.
[emphasis added to guide eyes]
Whatever system it is that you were saying is so frigging great, except that it got us into a mess.
I was commenting on a very specific conversation so please don’t pull a comment out of context to criticize. If you have something to say spit it out.
You mean you jumped in to criticize without knowing what I was referring to?
So did you vote for or against the war in Iraq? Did you vote for or against Soviet-style wiretapping? Did you vote for or against tax cuts for the wealthy?
I’m just glad that it’s you, and not I, who is defending a system that has gotten us in this shape.
I did what I was able and voted against Bush in both elections. Unfortunately there have been a lot of gutless Dems who did very little to seriously oppose the war and take a firm stand against this corrupt admin.
So , you don’t defend democracy? What system do you prefer?
So, when you get hired, do you give up the right to negotiate a raise with your boss? What unions do is to try to equalize power between workers and employers. What happens when a contract is up for renewal? There are negotiations. Both sides usually move. Unions never have been able to dictate a new contract. Employers have in a non-union situation.
You seem to think that employee freedom only exists in a love it or leave it situation. Why should employees have to give up their rights to talk together and act collectively? You seem to believe in freedom only for those with money.
Slave? In a strike, both sides lose. As for him not wanting to deal with workers collectively, maybe he also doesn’t want to hire black people, or white people, or women, or men. Tough. An employment contract doesn’t come with shackles and a whip.
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In essence, what Obama is proposing is that I can offer you a job for $10/hr, and you can accept that, then the day after you’re hired you can collude with your fellow workers to say, “Hey, now that you’ve hired us, we demand that you pay us three times the amount you offered to. And you can’t fire us, so pony up or go out of business.”
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Cite? Believe it or not, many negotiations involve a study of the books, because it doesn’t help the workers if the company goes under, does it? Look at the airline industry, and the concessions the big bad unions have made when the companies were really in trouble.
I can invent scenarios where the boss is raking in the money and yet pleads poverty for wages - but I won’t, since I don’t want to be simplistic.
Who is going to undercut WalMart on labor costs? How come companies like CostCo and Target do fine with better labor policies? Isn’t it better that WalMart compete on efficiency of their supply chain (which they do quite well at) and not by screwing their employees. Maybe they save money, but they lost me as a customer. It’s not just that I don’t like their policies, but their stores, even in the middle of Silicon Valley, are pig sties. Perhaps better paid employees would actually pick merchandise off the floor once in a while.
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This almost happened to Safeway here in Canada. Safeway’s workforce unionized, with the result that Safeway was forced to pay student box-boys $14/hr in 1980, when their competition was paying less than half that amount. Safeway’s prices went up, and the chain almost collapsed until it managed to negotiate a new deal with the union which allowed them to hire new employees for half the union rate - the old employees got to keep their salaries. So you had a situation in which a bunch of stores closed, costing hundreds of jobs and hurting the community, and the ones that stayed open had a staff where similarly qualified people were making twice as much as others, simply because they happened to be in the right place to cut a sweetheart deal.
[quote]
Safeway here has the same policy, and no stores have closed. (Unlike Albertsons which I think is nonunion.) I spend my money at Safeways because the people there are helpful and know what they are doing.
Contract negotiations have nothing to do with owning the company, except in rare instances, usually when the employer give stock instead of pay. When I worked for AT&T, which was strongly union, I don’t remember ownership coming up even once - only salaries and working conditions. Whyever do you think that collectively negotiating for better wages will be the ruin of capitalism? There was more union activity in the '50s, and the economy hummed along just fine. Does it ever occur to you that if all companies pay bare subsistence wages, no one will be able to buy their products. Which is exactly what is happening today, once the housing bubble ATM ran out of money.
If workers have the right to collectively bargain or unionize, shouldn’t the corporation have the right to hire someone off the street? If you answer no, please explain, because I have never been able to understand why employees to should be able to keep a company hostage. I mean, if you ant to work, work. If you think the job is worth more money, fine, strike even. But if some other guy off the street wants to do the job for less, that just proves that the claim that the job is worth more is false. Does it not?
As opposed to an employer keeping a lid on wages by firing anyone who would talk about it with someone else?
There are rules on both sides. Managers, for instance, are allowed to work, and unions cannot block the entrance to a company or intimidate them. Not to say that this doesn’t happen.
It might mean the guy is desperate. It might mean that the guy isn’t qualified. In any job, union or management, experienced people make more than new guys. Does that mean, since you can hire someone off the street to do the job for less, get rid of all the experienced people?
Why do you think the model of union negotiations is the big powerful union holding the little poor employer hostage? For big companies, it is a matter of losing money for shareholders against workers not getting paid. Do you think the average worker, especially these days, has a giant savings cushion? Do you think any money comes out of the pocket of the CEO during a strike?
What part of a free market only applies to employers?
That’s an answer? Funny, doesn’t look like an answer. Not with that little squiggle at the end.
Ya think?
It might mean any of those things. It also might mean that the collective bargaining is being used to hold the company hostage and artificially inflate wages when a lower dollar point might have been a perfectly good place for a willing worker and willing employer to meet.
His safety cushion has got squat to do with it. He’s free to gamble and hold out for more money. He’s also free to lose that gamble. When I’ve gone and asked my body fro raises over the years, I have to make a case. In every case there were from half a dozen to a hundred people in the company in the same location doing my exact job. I was free to say, if you don’t pay me X I can’t work here any more. And at that point it is up to him and the value he place’s on my contribution. Kinda makes an awful lot of sense, doesn’t it?
What does this have to do with a company being held hostage by collective bargaining and unions? The CEO, and other officers and managers have no union protections; they sink or swim on the value they bring to the job. Period. And, for your information, it doesn’t just happen in big companies. My friend’s family had a very small lumber yard for years, and even though they had only one union position that was non-family, they were able to tell him what time they could be open till on Saturday, lest they have to pay for all those holding a union card for the entire day.
But I don’t think you answered my question: if workers are involved in an organized strike, should the company be allowed to get people in off the street to do the job? And let’s say you’re okay with that. If in getting in this new guy they find the best worker they ever had, should they be allowed to fire one of the guys who striked and keep on the better worker?
Being a member of the reality based community, I’m happy to admit that most employers are fine and some union members are goons. Is a union ever beneficial in your mind? I’ve seen the difference between how fast actors get paid in union jobs vs non-union jobs.;
Employees are always free to vote against a union. The problem is that in some companies (who are non-union now and thus should be composed of joyful low paid workers) they don’t get a chance to have a fair vote for a union.
When a union goes out on strike, they are making that same gamble, but with slightly better odds. Lots of times a union doesn’t get what it wants. No one is saying that there should be a law giving a union what it asks for, just that workers should have the opportunity to level the playing field a bit.
The lack of a safety cushion means that the union has a powerful incentive to settle on reasonable terms. You are trying to make it sound as if the union has all the power, which is garbage.
Say you told a boss you couldn’t work there unless you get a raise. What if all other companies were run the same way? If you left, you’d be competing against all the low ballers you talk about. Knowing this, why would a boss even want to pay you what you were worth? Unless you have a talent in short supply, the less you get the more profit he makes.
Even given the not exactly tight control of shareholders over management, do you think holding out for a reasonable settlement is going to cost a CEO his job? And anyone who has looked at executive compensation can chuckle over your sink or swim. If they sink, they sink thanks to a life vest filled with gold.
I don’t quite get who is ordering whom to do what in your example. All I know is that my daughter’s friends in retail (non-union) work just enough to not get benefits. So there might be some reason a union requires a full day.
One? How are you going to distinguish between one swap and the claim that all the scabs are better, thus all the strikers can be fired? If the new person is so great, hire him and wait for attrition. Anyone coming in to replace striking workers knows full well it is temporary (and the new contract will specify this) and so should have no expectation of a permanent job. How hard do you think the boss will fight for this guy? Do you think he will let the strike go on one extra day to be able to hire him to replace a union worker?
Request for Doper Members of the SWG: Could you come in here and share how you held the big studios hostage? I’m sure we’d all like to hear how you had all the power in the recent strike.
I’m fully aware of what unions do. And I support unions. Somehow you seem to have missed the crux of the argument, which is that Obama wants to make it illegal to fire striking workers. Any ‘negotiation’ carried out at the point of a gun isn’t a negotiation, it’s a protection racket.
Unions derive their powers from the worker’s ability to bargain collectively, and to cause a company a large monetary loss if the entire workforce walks off the job. That costs the employer all the training he’s invested in the workforce, all the experience they have, and all the revenue he loses while he re-hires a workforce and retrains them.
If the employer no longer has the ability to fire the workers, then the ‘negotiation’ boils down to, “Give us what we want, or we’ll shut your business down.”
Not very much in the U.S., because it doesn’t have the kinds of laws Obama wants to enact. Go have a look at what unions have done in other countries when they’ve had more power. Go look at what was going on in Great Britain in the 1970’s.
Look, you could make a case for either one of the protections Obama wants to offer - allow employees to organize into unions - sure. If they do, and they strike, they run the risk that the employer will decide that their demands are too high and fire them. But they do gain power, because now they can act collectively. It’s a lot easier to fire a single worker than a union full of them.
Or, you could allow businesses to refuse to allow unionization, but for those who do, you could force them to deal with the union. There would still be some checks and balances, because companies that don’t want to unionize could forbid union activities - and if that is unacceptable to the work force, the employer won’t be able to hire people.
But if you have both - employers can’t stop unions from forming, and once they form the employer has no choice but to meet their demands or be forced out of business, then you’re severely restricting the employer’s rights to do what he wants with his own money, and you’re essentially turning control of industry over to labor.
But this plan will hurt labor as well, because if you make unions too powerful and thereby increase the costs and risks of hiring people, the natural result will be higher unemployment, and you’ll make it harder for employees to move out of a job they don’t like. Have a look at France - they have all kinds of ‘worker friendly’ laws that make it very hard for an employer to fire an employee. The result is that young people without an employment track record are seen as very high risk, because if you hire a lemon you’re stuck with him. So the unemployment rate in France for people between the age of 16 and 24 is 21% - compared to 11% in the United States.
Wow - a paycheck is equivalent to ‘shackles and a whip’, huh? But using actual government force against an employer is just promoting freedom or something. This is all vaguely Orwellian.
The cite to the actual proposal was in the OP.
No, it’s to the union’s benefit to extract every ounce of blood they can get out of the employer, just short of pushing the employer out of business. See: The United Auto Workers. They went on strike constantly in the 70’s and forced unsustainable benefit packages from their employers. Then when the employers started going under, they renegotiated a little less. Recently, GM has started to make a small recovery, with their key vehicle in their recovery being the Chevy Malibu. Workers in the Malibu plant recently went on strike again.
Hey, go for it. And I’ll counter with the fact that no one cares if the employer is rich or poor if other employers are willing to offer more for the same services. You always neglect to mention the fact that the employer is not in a monopoly situation - he has to bow to the demands of the market - both for the price of his goods and the price of the labor he needs to pay to make them. This is especially true in the modern era where we seem to be constantly near full employment, and the prevailing minimum wages are already higher than the goverment minimum, meaning there is no glut of labor.
I don’t know about your Costco, but mine has really crappy service. There are always huge lines at the cashiers, the goods are stacked warehouse-style, and they don’t have change rooms, nice aisles with clothes on the rack, and huge collections of small packages of food. In short, Costco works because it hires fewer people per dollar of output. That works for their model because they mostly sell goods in bulk.
For a little more perspective: Wal-Mart employs about 1.9 million people. Costco employs about 71,000. Per dollar of output, Wal-Mart employs three times as many people. Also, the average wage at Costco may be higher, but that’s because they have fewer menial jobs that need to be done. Wal-Mart employs a lot of people who just walk around and arrange shelves and put stock out. And because their stock has to be presented better (clothes on racks instead of in heaps or in bins), it takes more labor to do this. Costco hires mostly cashiers and warehouse personnel. Costco’s average sale amount per shopper is also much higher, meaning they need fewer cashiers to sell the same dollar value of goods. The bottom line is that Costco can afford to pay its employees more, and Costco’s business model is far less sensitive to the change in labor costs.
By the way, no one is going to compete with Wal-Mart on price - they compete with Wal-Mart on quality and shopping experience. Price is Wal-Mart’s competitive advantage. Take away that advantage, and why would you shop at Wal-Mart?
Hey, I thought you liberals didn’t like foreign sweat shops? Obama plans to force foreign factories to adhere to higher labor and environmental standards. So Wal-Mart’s supply chain advantage is also under attack from Obama.
Or more likely, Wal-Mart will have to do with even fewer employees, meaning the stores will be dirtier and the cashier lineups longer.
In any event, Wal-Mart could gain a competitive advantage by paying its employees more, don’t you think they would? If it helped the bottom line? In fact, they DO do that, or they’d be paying everyone minimum wage. Since they don’t, they obviously have had to respond to market pressure and pay their employees more than they legally have to. You just don’t like where the market price landed, and you’re trying to rationalize the use of force to get more money for the workers by claiming that somehow it will be better for the company, because you have some special insight into their business model that allows you to make this determination better than they can.
I don’t. There’s lots of union activity right now. As you point out, AT&T has a strong union. What will be the death of capitalism is if people like Obama manage to elevate the status of the worker above the status of the person who owns the business, and allows workers to dictate to the businessmen, and the businessmen having no choice but to accept their demands.
Are you kidding? The average hourly wage in the U.S. is currently $17.64 - more than twice the minimum wage (and about 20% higher than in ‘worker friendly’ Canada, btw). Most of those jobs are not unionized. The U.S. has the second highest per-capita income in the world (second only to Luxembourg).