... it is the last obstacle between living wages and benefits... and a 3rd world-style workforce all across America.

Why else do you think the message is that ONLY the rich actually contribute to the economy... because they are the only ones they WANT doing so. The more money the rich get.. the more they can spend!

www.greenanarchy.org

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Today fewer than one in ten workers belongs to a union down from one in three in the golden age of unionism in the 1950s and 1960s. Gone is the Middle Class that saw the biggest US economic expansion in history made possible by the pent up savings and heavy industrial expansion created by WWII war production. US post WWII expansion was based on a widening middle class and open world markets for US goods. The story of how we found ourselves outcompeted by the Japanese and German producers forced to retool after the war is an old story and only part of the explaination of the US fall from global economic hegemony. The Permanent War Economy, as writer Sy Melman called it, enabled US corporations to make billions off fat government defense prime and sub-contracts which was the core of US economic growth in this period along with auto production and other consumer durables. New Housing starts were also key to the boom.

Then came the overproduction of these goods and the high per capita annual GNP growth rate slowed way down. Inflation ensued and productivity slowed somewhat with dropping investment and the recession saw growing unemployment and wage deceleration. The US filled up with imports. Direct investment began to leave for overseas. Average wages declined. The party was over.

Currently, Paul Krugman, in a great article in Rolling Stone, talked about this very problem of anti-unionism by the rich. Today labor productivity is quite high but income hasn't risen with it. Almost all the income gains of the past 20 years are concentrated in the top 20% of the income ladder with about a third of the income gains concentrated in the upper 1%. The top !% now control about a fifth of the pretax income. The bottom 80% of US society has been barely keeping up with price rises or experiencing real income declines.

Income inequality has been worsened by the tax cuts. By the time the cuts become fully effective and Krugman estimates that the top 4% of earners will glean over 45% of the cuts. The cuts are highly regressive. According to the tax policy center if the cuts become permanent taxpayers in the top 1% of the scale will receive 28.2% of the total benefits though they only pay 24.7% of total federal taxes. Most Taxpayers averaged an annual tax savings of less than 3% of after tax income for a total savings of under $1,000/year. The top 1% received a cut of close to 5% aftertax income averaging $35,000/year. The top one-tenth of 1% will receive cuts averaging close to 8% of pre-tax income or about $185,000/year federal tax savings. Yet this is not the main inequality issue.

Krugman discusses CEO salaries. The CEO of GM in 1967 received $4.2 million in todays inflation adjusted dollars. At GM his salary was a 100:1 ratio with the average production worker who earned about $8,000 annually. Yet his salary is only 20% of F. Lee Scott's $23 million salary. Scott's earnings are 150 times that of the average fulltime Walmart worker who grosses only $18,000 annually. Walmart pays notoriously low wages but salary ratios are worse elsewhere. The worst ratios are about 431:1. On average they are just under 300:1. Here is where the real maldistribution lies.

There was higher annual rates of economic growth forty years ago and labor productivity was higher. The US actually had extensive export markets unlike today. Inflation is low and unemployment rates are close. Yet there is greater inequality. Economic growth rates are today half what they were 40 years ago. That is because slow growth correlates with high income concentration in the very top echelons of the society. That is the problem. Want more growth? Redistribute income!! The rich are to rich. The problem is globalization which enables the sending of capital overseas with cheap imports coming back. But it doesn't raise the standard of living. It actually makes things worse.

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It's not just the rich who dislike unions. Many people see themselves 'above' the Joe Six Pack crowd. Even though some barely make enough money to buy a six pack. Everyone is some form of elitist these days. Unions gave us a comfortable middle class for many years. It's especially good for women and minorities, since equaulity to some extent is built in. Teachers, nurses, college professors seem to like it. No one IN a union wants to get out. Thanks, ANNA

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A web only article from the Nation has this:

"In order to have a better America," Myers pronounced, ICE was busy catching undocumented immigrants before they could commit "criminal and in some cases even terrorist acts." She praised Alabama's introduction of law-enforcement officers into the process of applying for driver's licenses in that state and excoriated "sanctuary cities" like Houston and Chicago. Her prosecutorial mien surprised no one.

Then came something startling. As labor unions increasingly provide representation for undocumented workers, she said, "we need to look at" unions' violations of the boundary between "charitable assistance and the unlawful employment of aliens." Several lawyers were soon on the phone with labor officials trying to figure out what she meant. Is an ICE crackdown on labor organizing drives imminent? Was one already under way? Were unions harboring undocumented immigrants in violation of the law?

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd seemed a bit taken aback when reached by The Nation for clarification. "There is a fine line between organizing individuals, um, which is perfectly legal; however, once you cross that line where you might be involved in knowingly hiring illegal aliens, that's a problem." Then he reached for a bizarre analogy: mob lawyers. "We have had cases in the past, unfortunately, of attorneys doing the same thing," Boyd said. "Lawyers who knowingly accepted laundered drug money as payment for their legal services--going so far as accepting large plastic bags of cash." He compared that to a union "knowingly recruiting illegal aliens to join a company."

That makes no sense. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) specifically made companies criminally liable for knowingly hiring anyone in the country illegally. It exempts unions--who come in to organize workers after they are hired. Meanwhile, actual enforcement has proven so infrequent, and the rare penalties so negligible, that IRCA ended up creating a perverse incentive: Companies seek out workers without green cards as the most efficient way, as Yale law professor Michael Wishnie pointed out at the Chicago conference, to insure "union-free, OSHA-free, Title VII-free workplaces." You just have to threaten workers who make a fuss with deportation. (Wishnie found that 54 percent of worksites raided by immigration authorities had active labor disputes.) If anything, the existence of unions makes it harder to hire undocumented workers.

Yes, the government is back to being an anti-union force using illegal immigration as their justification. As they said earlier, when did union's hire workers? Isn't that management?

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...an Englishman, and explain the significance of the comment "make sure you get the 'and' in their name".
Thanks
TD

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Either laws dictate all companies over 100 employees have a union or nobody does, level the playing field. Companies can set you up for other reasons. Unions protect the guy who doesn't deserve protection.

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