Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions

[untermensche]

Where was it tried and failed?

How many times do I have to ask it before you either admit you have no answer or give one?

Several people have given stories where they started businesses with partners and then fell apart. Gore-tex was an example of a larger business that tried to blur the lines. Not sure if they are still or not.

Again.

Where was democratic control on a large scale tried, not just for a second but for time enough to make adjustments, and shown to fail?

Where was this large scale democratic failure you people speak of?

It is delusion.

 

[iolo]

Because of a high number of state employees. Unions are strong in the US in any field not subject to foreign competition.

Unions are strong in any field where they represent enough of the workers being exploited. Unfortunately brainwashing tends to restrict them, mostly, to single capitalist states, so that under current conditions union-busting is not hugely difficult in each of these.

 

[lpetrich]

The consumer is the ultimate master. ...

Looking at comments like this, I suspect that capitalism apologists would have been *very* eager defenders of antebellum-South plantation slavery. After all, Low Prices For The Consumer is an absolute good that can justify any means whatsoever.

 

[SimpleDon]

Pro-Union right wingers are pretty rare, aren't they?

My father and most all his co-workers were pretty right wing. He was a Journeyman Electrician shop rat working for GM. The only way to get him and his buddies UAW membership cards away from them was to pry it out of their cold dead hands.

ETA: I've known a lot of shop rats over my years. I used to hang out in a shop rat bar a half mile away from one of the local GM plants. I don't think I've ever met a liberal shop rat.

Point taken. Most union workers are social conservatives. They then vote for politicians that are both social conservatives and anti-union.

My experience is the same with construction trade union workers. They pretty much all admitted that their grandchildren wouldn't have union jobs to fill.

 

[SimpleDon]

One of the issues is that people really only see the bad parts. They see the parts where bad teachers are protected, bad cops are protected, etc and the good parts are harder to see.

Don't forget the higher prices they have to pay in order to subsidize the artificially-higher labor cost.

This is a common fallacy that increased wages result in higher prices. Increased wages, as long as they fall within the increases in productivity, result in lower profits not higher prices. What has happened in the last thirty five years is that all of the gains from increased productivity have gone to profits and not to wages. Before 1980 the increases in productivity were split between wages and profits 50/50.

If you are going to say that increased wages create artificially high labor costs you have to also say that higher profits create artificially high capital costs. I find few people who claim the first who will admit to the second. But capital costs as well as labor costs are included in the total production costs and in the price that the consumer pays.

 

[SimpleDon]

What people?

You mean people trapped in a system where they are taught to be mindless cogs and follow orders?

When you give people freedom you end up with completely different kinds of people.

What freedom they have or don't have has no bearing on this.

Note, also, that employee-owned companies have a tendency to crash and burn during bad times because they're not willing to downsize to survive the storm.

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Unions were strong when there was no meaningful foreign competition. Now that there is industries with strong unions are pretty much destroyed by foreign competition unless they are somehow shielded from it (say, airlines.)

No. Unions are strong in every other western nation.

Because of a high number of state employees. Unions are strong in the US in any field not subject to foreign competition.

This is correct. The obvious solution then is to minimize foreign competition. And yet we have done just the opposite, we have increased our economy's exposure to foreign competition. And we have exposed more of our workers to wage competition with low wage countries.

In essence we are running a government sponsored program of building industries in foreign countries and increasing wages in foreign countries costing 500 billion dollars a year currently, the annual trade deficit.

The problem isn't just in the industries that are exposed to foreign competition, the pressure on wages is felt through the whole economy.

 

[ZiprHead]

My father and most all his co-workers were pretty right wing. He was a Journeyman Electrician shop rat working for GM. The only way to get him and his buddies UAW membership cards away from them was to pry it out of their cold dead hands.

ETA: I've known a lot of shop rats over my years. I used to hang out in a shop rat bar a half mile away from one of the local GM plants. I don't think I've ever met a liberal shop rat.

Point taken. Most union workers are social conservatives. They then vote for politicians that are both social conservatives and anti-union.

My experience is the same with construction trade union workers. They pretty much all admitted that their grandchildren wouldn't have union jobs to fill.

Actually this was during the eighties when anti-union conservatism was just getting off the ground. I can't really say how they would have voted for a conservative who was proudly anti-union. I don't think they would have. And my father's long gone so I can't ask him.

 

[SimpleDon]

The consumer is the ultimate master. ...

Looking at comments like this, I suspect that capitalism apologists would have been *very* eager defenders of antebellum-South plantation slavery. After all, Low Prices For The Consumer is an absolute good that can justify any means whatsoever.

Obviously there are no absolute goods in the economy, which is the point you are making.

Lower prices begin to lose their benefit to the economy when they come at the cost of lower wages. Wages aren't just a cost of production, they also provide the means by which consumers are able to buy things. Lower wages means that people are able to buy less, obviously.

Try this. A good, successful economy exhibits these traits,

1. They are self-sustaining and stable, the operation of the economy provides the means to keep the economy going and it does this without major disruptions like recessions, depressions, high runaway inflation or any deflation.*
2. The economy distributes its gains to the members of the society that the economy is in, to support them and provide for their needs.*

Both are important but it is fair to say that the second is the reason that the economy exists, to provide for all of the members of the society. The first is only required up to the point that the economy is self-sustaining, you don't have to move any further than that.

These simple two, obviously true statements give us much of what we need to evaluate much of the economy. For example, wages are the primary means of distributing the gains from the economy to the vast majority of the members of our society. It would follow from this that we have a large economic stake in the level of the wages in the economy.

Since we use capitalism as our form of the economy, profits have to be considered largely a way that capitalism is sustaining itself by providing the incentive for the capital investment needed to replace the capital goods that are worn or obsolete or the new capital needed for growth and not as a way to deliver people what they need to stay alive and to share in the gains from the economy. There is almost a universal agreement that it is better for people to have to work than it is for them to live on unearned income.

Since profits are a way of sustaining the capitalist form of our economy we also have a good idea of how much profits we need in a year and how much more would be considered to be excessive and not needed. Currently we are running corporate profits in excess of four times the amount of money that we are using in business investment, the money needed to make capitalism self-sustaining and that allows it to grow and to add needed jobs. While the historical average is only twice the amount of business investment to be collected in profits. But even this number of twice includes periods when individual investment was a substantial part of the virtuous business investment. Now it is much less so, business don't issue stock to raise money for investment. They use retained earnings, issue corporate bonds or take out bank loans.

Obviously this level of profits at four times the needed business investment is excessive. And in fact it is easy to demonstrate that this excessive amount of profits actually destabilizes the economy because it quite often goes into unsustainable asset bubbles like the housing bubble of 1999 to 2007 that burst triggering the worst recession since the Great Depression.

And this excessive amount of profits is generated at the expense of increased wages. Which if had been paid as higher wage would have forestalled much of the private debt that was created in this period, debt that made the recession of 2008 much worse than it would have been. Also higher wages would have increased demand in the economy providing the need to justify the virtuous investment of building added production facilities, the kind of investment that leads the economy to real growth.





* These two empirical observations are what the economist  Nicholas Kaldor calls "stylized facts," observations that occur so often through history and in different economies that they take on the characteristics of known facts.