| > Unions prevent those businesses from being able to maintain competitive pricing in global markets due to labor costs, so those obligations eventually put the company out of business or force it to move operations - normally out of sheer survival since other companies in the space will be doing the same. Well this is false on a number of levels but is a common argument - "if you're the one doing all the work and creating all the wealth, don't organize with the other workers to keep more of the wealth you create, or the soi distant 'job
creator' heirs expropriating your surplus labor time might send you into poverty". Of course no one ever tells the heirs who expropriate profits from these companies that they should shirk in fear in organizing together for their class interests. You make a number of discordant points. If we are in an economic system, the fourth one in the past few millennia, where "the growth phase is over", then clearly it is also the beginning of the end of the fourth economic system, and the birth of the fifth system which was born in the Paris Commune is coming. Pensions are dying as are other old age moneys - it is under attack, and organized workers are what keeps it alive. Companies don't have a problem with competitive pricing. They have a problem with below-desired profits. The business press says this. See the recent (non-union) Facebook drop. "Out of business or move"...GM was organized in 1936. Larry Page's grandfather helped do that. In fact Page has held up the weapon his grandfather carried during a strike. The grandfather then made enough to send his son to college. And the son's son formed Google. Maybe GM profits fell at some point, but the family had already moved on. Compare to the completely unregulated textile mills in the Carolinas. No unions, yet the plants still closed down and left the country. Low paid grandchildren with no college education now see the big employer in town shutter up and they are out of luck. Thanks, I would prefer the former case. As far as understanding international capital flows and cycles, Karl Marx spoke about that a century and as half ago and spoke about overproduction, recessions, falling profits, continuing income inequality etc. Not in a liberal social democrat way, but in a way that showed the system would eventually self-destruct as feudalism in Europe had, or how the Roman Empire and it's slave latifundias did, or as hunter-gatherer bands had on the face of the agricultural Sumerian slave empires. The contradictions and self-destructiveness Marx pointed out are still happening - one example being the 1999 Glass-Steagall bank deregulation followed 9 years later by the "too big to fail" taxpayer TARP bailout. It's not hypocrisy - it's contradiction. It's cognitive dissonance which will eventually rent things apart - which has been renting things apart. As a worker creating wealth, I'll take my own council and organize together with my fellow workers as opposed to prostrating myself before the parasitical heirs expropriating my surplus labor time for scraps of food. |
There is a time for unions and there is a time for leaving a broken system. The ocean is bigger than textile mills in the Carolinas and there are more factors involved. Expand your perspectives and it won't seem discordant.
Would you say a broken arm is a symptom of lung cancer?
There is always an area that is growing while another is declining, not in a zero-sum manner but in a progressive way that increases quality of life across the board.
There is a trend in motion toward the marginal cost of production approaching zero, making physical things effectively worthless compared to the creative effort involved.
Humanity is fallible, and those who study history are doomed to watch those who have not repeat it.