Today's Quote

"This is the question 'the right' has to answer:  Do you want smaller government with less handouts, or do you want a minimum wage?  Because you can't have both.  If Colonel Sanders isn't going to pay the lady behind the counter enough to live on, then Uncle Sam has to, and I for one am getting a little tired of helping highly profitable companies pay their workers."  --Bill Maher

Today - Again

35 years ago, I was pretty anti-union.  I tho't they'd had their day; they'd been useful and good once upon a time, but they'd become too big and too powerful (therefore corrupt), and so they needed to be reined in.  I don't think I was wrong as far as that particular tho't was concerned at that particular time.  What makes it all wrong now is that unions have been beat back and beat down for so long, that we're seeing all of the bad shit happen that the unions warned us would happen if we abandoned the unions altogether, rather than just getting things back into balance.

So, basically, what's happening is that the American labor force is being reduced to the standards of the rest of the world, when what we used to hold out as a primary goal was the raising of labor standards in those other countries to be more in line with our own.

What I'm having the most trouble understanding is why we think downward pressure on wages and prices is a good thing when we're supposed to be the level-headed-clear-eyed capitalists who understand that exactly the opposite is what makes the whole thing actually work.

From Bill Moyers:

Today, a single parent earning minimum wage takes home $15,080 a year. That’s $3,400 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. President Obama noted the statistic in his State of the Union Address — “That’s wrong,” he said, calling for an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour because “in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”

A "small" example of the relationships between Unions, Wages and Outcomes by way of Addicting Info:

In the current anti-union climate in the U.S., there may not be any group of unions that has been singled out for more criticism than teachers’ unions. Unions such as the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have been blamed by politicians, think tanks, and the public for everything from low student achievement to blocking proposed education reforms.

However, despite claims from some quarters that unions are a large part of the problem with American public education, there is ample evidence that teachers’ unions are a vital piece of the education puzzle, and that students benefit from their existence.

If I pay the worker in Laos a whopping 3 bucks a day to make toasters, then I can sell a toaster to you for 10 or 12 bucks (instead of 30 or 40), which means I can pay you less for whatever you do (like teaching?), which means I can keep more for myself.

Like I said above, oddly enough it works (and works better for more people) when we do it the other way around, but apparently that's just too complicated for the geniuses being churned out by American MBA mills.  They aren't learning Fair Practice or Business Ethics or Mutual Advantage or anything else that doesn't fit in with the Imperial Predator Model of commerce in the 21st century - which (also oddly enough) fits perfectly with what we know about how things were done 65 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 150 years ago, and 250 years ago; as far back as you care to look.

Anyway, we said we were gonna be different.  So let's be different.

Today

While we're busy celebrating this Fall - yelling about everything from, "Remember 9/11" and "Support The Troops" to "Yay Football", maybe we could take a small moment and remember the sacrifice of some people who are now pretty much demonized and belittled; people who wanted little more than for this country to live up to its promises.

Per Wikipedia:

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.
In 1914, when workers at Colorado mine went on strike, company guards fired machine guns and killed several men. More battling followed, during which 2 women and 11 children were killed and John D. Rockefeller Jr., the chief mine owner, was pilloried for what had happened.
The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company(RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).
In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.^[1] The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Thomas G. Andrews described it as the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States".^[2]The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".^[3] Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident.^[4] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day.
The Ludlow site, 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the UMWA, which erected a granite monument in memory of the miners and their families who died that day.^[5] The Ludlow Tent Colony Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.^[5] Modern archeological investigation largely supports the strikers' reports of the event.^[6]

The Krugman Speaks

I lifted the whole thing from from Paul Krugman's blog at NYT:

The Fake Skills Shortage

Kudos to Adam Davidson for some much-needed mythbusting about the supposed skills shortage holding the US economy back. Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering. Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.

And this dovetails perfectly with one of the key arguments against the claim that much of our unemployment is “structural”, due to a mismatch between skills and labor demand. If that were true, you should see soaring wages for those workers who do have the right skills; in fact, with rare exceptions you don’t.

So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.

It's always something phony - whenever you ask anybody about what's up with the economy, they're ready with some crapola like "my business can't do anything until we see some certainty restored to the system", or this malarkey about "structural problems of skills-matching".

I make no claims about knowing the whole answer, but I know it has nothing to do with the Politically Correct blather we get from Plutocrats, and everything to do with Demand - the kind of demand you get when people are working in positions where they can feel relatively confident their jobs won't simply disappear; and when they can have some reassurance that their efforts will be rewarded fairly.

Whatever happened to the guys who knew enough to understand "you gotta spend money to make money"?

Be sure to read the Adam Davidson piece too:

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.