Or a fervent person of any strong personal belief?? This sounds like a description of most of this newgroup.
As far as "communists" are concerned, anyone can look at the history concerning unions and their formation and see that early on there were many street battles as the Communist party tried to take control of the unions.
My Grandfather was a union organizer during the early
1900's and told us kids about the Communists attacking them on the streets with lead pipes, guns and clubs.
And he told about the time when he was hit in his left ear by a Communist agitator wielding a "sap" (causing him permanent deafness in that ear). And how he took away that "sap" and used it on his attacker; I still have that "sap" by the way.
There were no police to protect them as the police were protecting the interests of the companies. And don't forget the companies own private armies which were as bad as the "Commies"; (talk about an "up-hill battle").
Refering to union people as Communists is deeply insulting. These people helped make America great as much as (and perhaps, in some ways more than) any non-union American worker.
I'm inclined to let people be------and don't particularly like the acrimony that has developed------but I also don't like being endlessly spammed by any individual that is peddling an agenda that is known to be harmful, at least to me, and is relentless in his/her presentations, using their assumed position to elevate themselves above others, as if their union affiliation, somehow, makes them better than the people to whom they're proselytizing. When this individual drops the union dogma, he's likely to be good company-----but not until then.
We can talk about just about any subject matter without insisting the "other guy" is good enough only when he joins our organization, and agrees with our point of view, which is obviously slanted to benefit a few at great cost to many.
I would go with "troll" rather than "spam" but, my point remains - the only thing I remember seeing from him, is him telling us how great unions are and how those of us who aren't in them are, what was his word, non-producers? Sorry, but doesn't apply, and I've had some _very_ disgusting experiences with unions. Including one who wouldn't protect a close family member when they needed help with an environmental issue at work.
From where I see, they passed their usefulness 50 or 100 years ago.
He also posted a link to machine-shop definitions. He's outdone you 2:1. d8-)
I sure hope so. I'm not getting any other bennies. As a self-employed writer, my health insurance alone is (or was, until September) running me $14,000/yr. Do you get a better deal than that? If so, who is giving you the kickback?
No unions for writers, unless you write for TV or the movies.
Firstly, Ron's tone of voice is fairly strident in regard to unions, but fairly mild about those who oppose them. I'm surprised he hasn't reacted more strongly to the personal insults. You can bet that I would have.
Secondly, if you take insult from the "implications" of what he's said, then those implications are the result of you talking to yourself. There are no implications of insult in what Ron has written. You're just reading into it something that isn't really there.
And third, your work is one thing, and is not an issue in question. There is no implication in anything Ron said, or that I have said, about how hard you've worked or how good you are at it. I don't doubt that both have been excellent. The question is -- and this is a question that you, by your own admission, have been unable to even address, let alone to answer -- is how you came to be paid a middle-class income for it. Despite Dan's comments about farming backgrounds and so on, there's nothing in the industrial history of the United States, or of England, or of continental Europe, that suggests you would be paid much more than subsistence wages without the re-equilibrializing of income between labor and capital that was brought about by organized labor in the period 1870 - 1935. Other forces were at work, but you won't find much disagreement from the people who have really studied that period of history that unions were the precipitating factor.
Without knowing how much you've studied the early industrial history of the US, I don't know what to address. I would talk about it in terms of the violent period that began roughly around 1885 and that ended in the 1920s, and look then at the next wave, which was labor struggling with the Great Depression. And I would argue that there was no period in that time during which individual laborers had the slightest bit of force to apply against the bosses, that all of the gains that put you in the middle class, when you finally came along, were the result of organized labor more than anything else. It re-trained ownership and management to a new set of realities. It established a new equilbrium; not a "natural" one, because that's one in which labor is too weak to rise much above subsistence. The equilibrium we work under today, which has kept you and I in the middle class, is a forced equilibrium that is in some danger of being undermined as we speak. The curious economic fact is that the "forced" equilibrium has produced the greatest period of economic growth in human history.
But this disagreement isn't based on a real examination of history, only of impressions that people have gained from their own, much more recent work experiences. In that narrow time frame unions have looked pretty miserable. We forget, or many of never really knew, what the "working class" meant in industrial economies until it was broken down by violence. There is no "working class" in western societies now. We're all middle class, or working-poor aspirers to the middle class, or climbers trying to get above the middle class.
We all have benefitted from the violent change. If you don't recognize it, and you'd rather villify anyone who is still fighting that battle, even though the battle was won long ago and is of suspect value today, I'm not going to argue with you about it. Whatever theory you have about what a job is "worth," what the proper equilibrium is between labor and ownership, it comes from somewhere that we can't seem to discuss.
And nothing personal from my end, either, Harold. It's just a matter of principle on which we strongly disagree.
I knew you would not be convinced. But the middle class owes its expansion to the increased productivity that occurred in that period. You can not get above subsistance wages unless you can produce more than is necessary to subsist. No amount of unionization could create above subsistance wages unless the productivity grew. With the increases in productivity, it was inevitable that wages would rise above subsistance levels. The majority of the country had no unions, yet still had a middle class.
There is no forced equilibrium. This is the natural equilibrium. Companies need skilled labor. The fact that white collar workers earn more than unskilled labor even though they are not unionized, destroys your argument that unions were necessary to bring wages above subsistance levels.
Look at China. As far as I know unions are not prevalent there. But there are tremendous increases in productivity there and the wages are rising as a result.
So, How would everyone feel if I started posting long endless dissertations on the benefit of having Hillary as our next president? After all, some descriptions of her have used metal related terms? I could go on and on and on and on as to why I think she is the greatest thing since popcorn. And everyone is expected to just accept it silently?
I have lots of new Starrett pocket charts. The charts are 3x5 inches.. I have both tape drill size and the metric conversion.These charts are handy for your tool boxes. If you will email me your mailing address. I will send you a set or two.
You presented nothing to convince, Dan. It was a couple of anecdotes and an unsupported assertion. I said it was very reasonable, not that it was convincing. d8-)
You're engaging in cracker-barrel theorizing. If you want to do that, I could apply the same level of logical sophistication and rejoin that improving productivity reduces the need for workers, which applies downward pressure on wages. In fact, the last two decades "prove" it: we've had an extended period of remarkable productivity increases, accompanied by dead-flat wages for lower-middle-class workers. (In that light you may find a recent Onion article interesting: "Study Finds Working at Work Improves Productivity.")
formatting link
This kind of theorizing will get us nowhere. In fact, no theorizing we're likely to engage here will get us anywhere worthwhile. This is a subject that's been tackled for decades at a high level, in history, economics, and political science. You could see the recent work on "the arc of the middle class." And you could get your assumptions knocked off balance by looking up an important paper published some years ago about the "Great Compression," which shows that the real kick in the ass for the middle class happened all at once, during WWII. Before the war, workers were struggling their way into middle-class lifestyles, uphill against the Depression and deflationary trends. After the war, everybody was suddenly there. The blowtorch heat applied to the economy by the war and deficit spending started the flywheel spinning. The numbers are amazing.
Not at all. You'd need to present a lot of facts to show that white collar wages during the '20s and '30s weren't the consequence of "freeloading," as the unions put it, on unions' gains. For example, you'd have to track the relative timing of various quintiles of income, backed up with demographic distinctions that really identified the white-collar workers as a class. That's serious work, and not something that lends itself to off-the-cuff hypotheses.
That's a whole different set of dynamics. Wages still suck. Women in the interior still make 17 cents/hour for assembling Reeboks, and it has been argued that China's wages are driven by extraordinary demand that would never occur in an economy that wasn't getting a free ride on enormous consumption by high-wage foreign trade partners -- notably the United States.
You're trying to revise some pretty well established ideas in economic history, Dan, and you're doing it with superficial hypotheses. If you want some ammunition, check out the right-wing think tanks. They're good at making black appear to be white, and at redefining poverty as wealth and wealth as poverty. Like Gunner's cutting and pasting, you could dump arguments and statistics here faster than anyone could check them out. d8-)
But a decent study of the professional literature would take you a lot less time and would be more illuminating, besides.
You don't have to accept it silently. All you have to do is disagree. If you attack the messenger as a "fool" or a communist, we'll know that you're really at a loss for words and not really up to engaging the argument.
The downward pressure on US wages has been the offshoring. Lots of available laborers offshore. Did not have much of an effect until we got much cheaper shipping from larger ships and use of containers. Because of container ships, the offshore labor now has an effect on the onshore labor.
If on the other hand you think it terms of the whole world, then you no longer have dead flat wages. The wages in other countries has been going up. So the whole earth wages have been rising.
You are saying that WWII was much more of a force than the Unions? I'll drink to that.
First the White collar workers in the South and the farm states did not get much freeloading on union gains in wages. You have to remember that the Unions were not very widespread. But those farm areas did benefit a lot from all the goods they could buy. Farming productivity increased a huge amount. Which meant the farmers had more money to spend and the mecrchants benefited from that.
Second how much free loading can one get from union gains, when the white collar workers are earning more than the blue collar workers. The unions were trying to reduce that difference.
I agree wages in China do suck, but they are rising in terms of what they can purchase. Can't really agree with free ride, however. Both China and the US are benefiting from the trade. If the US was not benefiting, we would not be buying goods from China. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't think I am trying to revise any economic ideas. Just pointing out that productivity has to increase in order to have a higher standard of living. Unions are not noted for their influence in raising productivity. A middle class required increased productivity. It apparently does not require unions at this time. You have not given any arguments as to why it required unions in the thirties. The same result might have happened without unions. But it might have required more time.
The traditional pressures long recognized by economists and business managers are related to supply and demand. Labor supply exceeded demand throughout most of our industrial history, which, before new forces came into play with organized labor, kept wages flat or at times even drove them down -- except when unions kept them up. On those rare occassions that demand exceeded supply (WWII, the Dot-Com Bubble), wages went sharply up. Until the wage bar was raised by unions and labor laws, productivity didn't have much effect on wages. Just look at the abstract on this one:
formatting link
Now, offshoring is delivering a double whammy: increased labor supply, and it's willing to work cheap. Wages go down.
That's a major cause, yes. Another is the free (more or less) trade made possible by the WTO and globalization. And there's NAFTA.
True enough. If you're a real theorizer and if you can back 'way off from the real lives of real people, you can even see it as a good thing that will work out just fine in the end. Milton Friedman is one of those. Thomas Friedman is, too.
But you still have to ask what has driven that trend upward. It isn't simple, and you won't find many serious economists who ignore the long-term effects of unions.
Oh, yes. It was huge. The unions had their effect in earlier decades, and then again in the 1950s and 1960s, when they pushed up wages across the board. But the shortage of workers -- so short that it forced companies to hire and train women for traditionally male jobs -- accompanied by ferocious government spending, was the most powerful equalizer in our history.
I'd have to see a good analysis before I'd buy that. It sounds superficial and selective. I've never seen anything that suggests family farming drove anyone into the middle class on its own, without the huge power of industrialization to prop it up. Something is missing there.
And the companies had to keep paying white-collar workers more to keep up the differential that allowed them to demand more of the white-collar workers. This isn't speculation. It's part of labor history.
The "free ride" refers to the fact that they didn't have to build domestic markets. The markets that drive their economy have all been external. Now that they're getting rich on export-oriented economics, their domestic market is following along behind like a puppy dog. But it's still a consequence, not a cause, of their economic growth. Japan did the same thing once upon a time.
Without opening another can of worms here, let's just recognize that the battle unions were fighting in the early days were all about who got what share of the profits, not about productivity. Labor can double its income by doubling the share of profits it extracts from the owners. And history shows that there was plenty of flexibility there, that labor was able to coerce more of the profits without killing the golden goose.
One interesting fact that relates to this equation is that, if unions are truly successful, capital will accept any rate of return it can get. If labor extracts too much, there is no growth of capital and thus no growth overall. But short of that, you can squeeze capital really hard if it has no place to go. It isn't going to go into mattresses. It's going to be invested, even if the rate of return is 1%.
All of which adds an interesting dimension to business's push for globalization. In one sense it's an attempt to get capital out of the clutches of unions and government. Instead of being coerced, it's now in a position to play one government against another, one population against another, and to be the ones who do the coercing.
I don't mean to imply that it's all so cynical, but some of that actually is happening right now. NAFTA and other free-trade, free-capital-flow agreements open up the opportunity. And one thing that free enterprise is good at is finding and exploiting opportunities.
While I was employed in the union shop that was closed due to the union killing production, I was told, personally, by a union worker, to slow down. I was turning out 25 final drives (threading shafts for lock rings) per day, but was told that the union liked each man to turn out only eight. They had the philosophy that if you turned out 25 each day, then had a bad day and got only eight, that the company would likely give you a hard time.
Makes sense to me. Give the company a bad day, every day, for fair pay.
I can't imagine why that plant closed down.
Eimco crawler tractor division. Doors closed in 1965, as I recall.
If you don't mind a compliment, your presentations here are mind numbing to a guy like me. I don't pretend to understand how things work, and am mostly driven by emotions and what I consider fair play.
Again, nothing personal, Ed. It's just that things are not always as they appear, or as you say they are. In this case, your positive union bias shows loud and clear.
Hell no, I'm not angry. This has been a damned good educational experience for this old uneducated idiot (that didn't see the writing's on the wall).
I, too, have been amazed at some of the vitriol spilled on this thread over the last few days, although it appears that some civility is starting to be re-established. I have been ignoring this until today; simply having tracked the number of posts appearing daily was scary enough. Just a couple of comments:
I, too, have had a dim view of unions generally, based on observations when I was younger (70s-80s, I would guess) of strike activities against automotive corporations when the relative wages of the typical worker in that setting were so much higher than most "normal" workers. I, like Harold, always have felt that I didn't need anyone to represent me to management because I could do it better, just by doing my job in the way I could do it. I did have an experience working for Harvard (at the medical school as a research machinist) during the time when a number of jobs got unionized. I didn't join the union as I recall, but my salary got bumped about 10% as a result of the process. That was nice, but it gave me a lot of mixed feelings.
The other main experience I had that informed my limited personal view of unions was while I was managing the shop floor at a plastics fabricator/machine shop in New England in the early 80s. We were fairly close to the GE jet engine mfg. plant in Lynn, Mass., and there were some massive layoffs there, resulting in a number of job seekers in the front door of my facility. People who had been there 15-25 yrs., calling themselves "machinists", were applying for all-around machinist positions, but had zero experience on any machine other than, for instance, a 48" vertical turret lathe, in all the years of work at the place. That seemed to me at the time ludicrous. My shop was a non-union environment, a division of a privately-held corporation, and there was no way I could justify hiring those applicants, even if I could have paid them at the much higher wages to which they were accustomed. They were appearing to me as unskilled labor, relatively speaking.
My more worldly views of late have come from the last 17 years of work for a high-tech company building optical metrology equipment. After 16 years and one previous merger, the company was acquired by a much larger corporation, about one year was spent putting the pieces in place, and then major chunks of both non-essential busywork and core technology were outsourced to India, Singapore, and other domestic suppliers. The acquisition was based in part on a motivation to eliminate competition. Two dozen people (20%) were laid off (after the co. had gutted the engineering staff at a different location, 70+ people), and the operation will now consist of opening boxes and bolting components on.
This most recent experience doesn't really change my views of unions, generally, but it is an indication that "increasing shareholder value" is THE driving force in the corporate boardroom. The tactics for doing so involve gains in productivity. Once you have reached the maximum gain in the existing location by improvements in efficiency, the logical next step is reducing the costs of that level of production. Different material suppliers and a cheaper labor source are your two choices.
It is my opinion that unions were a major factor in labor's economic development. The industrial "robber barons" and plutocrats of the early
20th century looked on the working class simply as a commodity, to be used as needed when needed, but not requiring any feedback or consideration. The wage scale disparity between management and the bottom of the worker scale was fairly wide. The interesting part today is that this gap, after narrowing somewhat in the middle and late 20th century, is widening dramatically again, for a number of reasons. It may be also interesting to see if the highly-compensated top executives located in the US end up getting themselves out- sourced to a lower-priced nation, where salary, options, and stock grants may be less lucrative....
Dan and Ed -- I wouldn't presume to offer much substance to your comments and discussion, but having had some small exposure to the German business economy from working through a European service division, I can say that there is a wide variety of subsidies and grants that many businesses in Germany use in various ways. Siting the AMD plant in Dresden in a high-labor cost area has a great deal to do with not only those subsidies, but also the availability of raw material within the local area (silicon wafers from Siltronic/Wacker AG).
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.