Impeachment

[Kirkland Laing]

If you don't want to be talked down to then don't make utterly moronic posts. Trying to argue against seventy five years of data with fucking anecdotes is laugh out loud idiotic. I've been really polite considering the garbage you're posting.

What I've written isn't speculation. Unions managed to secure about a third of increases in national income for their members and the wider workforce. Since the unions were neutered forty years ago the US workforce now gets absolutely fuck all because American labour has no bargaining power anymore. You can come up with an explanation why this has happened that doesn't involve unions losing their power anytime you want.

But you don't want to do that. You just can't face the fact that you're significantly worse off financially today than you would have been had unions still had the power they had back in the fifties and sixties. You're quite happy to see the top one percent loot the economy and parrot their propaganda about how it all works. It's like you're watching me come out of a bank with trolleys full of bags of cash and I'm loading my van to make a getaway and you're saying sit, wait, you dropped a bag. Let me help you load your truck. Idiot.


Fuck off, Kirk. You're a lot more belligerent than I remember you. As an avowed Reagan hater, you laughingly talk about unions getting "neutered" forty years ago, implying they don't exist or are woefully ineffective. You stupidly ignore their existence today, even if on a more measured level. You laser focus on your charts and graphs, ignoring all other factors, and the basic fact that most in the industry acknowledge and argue both the good and the bad that labor unions bring. You also laughingly attribute all of the economy's woes to the drop in union memberships and in their power and influence as well. You're good at posting charts and graphs, but lousy at logic.

Basically you're just another fucking fanatic who can't see the forest for the trees. Union... good. Management.... bad. Still living in the 60's, or whatever the fuck other era you happen to be stuck in. You conveniently ignore any other factors that may get in the way of your horse blinders. I honestly thought you were smarter and more even-tempered than that. I guess I thought wrong.

Unions can, and have on occasion, impeded their company's ability to compete by their unwillingness to compromise, even when it means reducing the competitiveness of the firm. In the end, everybody loses. But you don't see that side of that, because you have this puzzling attitude that keeps you from seeing anything big picture. You're just another fanatical bozo like the loser from Good Will Hunting who regurgitates what he memorizes from the textbooks.

Really..... fuck off.

"The industry". I'm not going on one industry or even the industrial sector of the US economy. I'm going on the entire US economy over 75 years. Not anecdata from one person's experience and the experience of a bunch of similarly clueless people that he's talked to.

And by the way, the Japanese steel industry had the same experience with being undercut by cheaper labour that America did. By the mid eighties Japan was having its lunch eaten by Korea, Taiwan and other Asian countries where the labour was cheaper. It wasn't down to unions of anything else, it was down to a second world economy becoming a first world economy and then being undercut by emerging second world economies.

But your incorrect anecdata leads me beauttifully to be able to make my point again with another excellent example. America suffered in the seventies and eighties from emerging economies taking global market share away from its domestic businesses. But eventually all these people found new jobs. You may be aware that our current president is trumpeting the best economy ever and the lowest unemployment in half a century. But there's a problem here. A lot of these new jobs are shitty jobs with low pay and no benefits compared to jobs back in the day.

Want to take a guess why? GDP per capita has doubled in real terms since Reagan busted the unions. But that huge increase in income hasn't gone to the vast majority of the country. It's going to a tiny number of people at the top of the tree. Why is that? Is the fact that American labour now can't bargain collectively with their bosses to be given a slice of that increased income to blame? Maybe the fact that the date labour/unions lost their political muscle coinciding with American wages stagnating isn't a coincidence?

Other questions you won't answer. Why did industrial/factory type jobs pay so well in the first place? Was it because it was easy to organise the labour in big industrys because big groups of people worked in the same place? Why did they have great wages and benefits back then to the point where a union wage could buy a house, raise a family, pay for holidays and cars and the American dream and even enough for college funds for the kids? How could all that be done on one wage compared to now? Have you seen when women first started to move into the employment market en masse? Nowadays families can't make ends meet working two full time jobs. How can national income per person have doubled in the last forty years yet families have gone from one income to two and are still struggling?

How come the workers at Foxconn (the people who assemble iphones) are working for a dollar an hour doing a hundred and twenty hours a week with working conditions so inhumane that the dormitories they live in are surrounded by suicide nets to stop workers creating bad publicity for Apple?




Maybe the fact that they're not allowed to unionise has something to do with it. Just a thought.

Like I said previously, take unions out of this altogether. Ban unions. End them completely. The fact remains that American labour needs some way to be able to get a slice of the increasing economic pie from bosses. American labour used to have a way to do this, now they don't. Whether it's unions or some other actor negotiating for labour then labour really needs this. It's not just a question of families struggling or fairness or anything like that. I'm not that fussed about other people to be honest. What I can see as clear as day, because I study this stuff for a living and have done for nearly thirty years now, is that the economy has become so unequal -- coincidentally starting to become so when unions lost their power -- that it is now a deformed entity, unable to generate decent economic growth even with massive ongoing economic stimulus and increasing large scale debt. And this has consequences eventually.