A compelling (left-wing) article. What do you think?

[aleph_null1]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: quote: Originally posted by aleph_null1: (1) I'll be the first to agree that capitalism encourages the wealthy to be wealthier, encourages large business to thrive over small, and tends to increase class disparity. (2) Which has nothing to do with the notion that competition reduces wages.

I added the numerals, because I want to point out that #1 appears to logically contradict #2, especially when you look to class disparity.[/QUOTE]Rereading it, I have to agree with you -- that may be my most poorly worded response on record.

What I was trying to say was that, yes, "of course" competition reduces wages; that's supply & demand. My beef with the author is that he leaves it at that. Wages will go back up, and will probably even peak again before settling back to their market value, minimum wages aside.

Now I've worked minimum wage jobs before -- I've worked less than minimum wage jobs before. I'm not suggesting that it be abolished / reduced / &tc.

I'm going to stop now... should never have come to CE forum [img]graemlins/crazyeyes.gif[/img]

[Melusine]

Please don't lynch me for a blatant and annoyingly off-topic nitpick, but Cerek, lurking on several topics today and reading the arguments, I couldn't help but notice you consistently misspell the word honest/honesty. It's written with an 'e', not an 'o' (honost/honosty). I've seen it at least four times this day alone. Hope you don't mind my pointing it out. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Aleph, I think you nailed it right on the money. The guy who wrote the article seems to be lacking in a lot of ways. His comments make assumptions that in some cases do prove to be true....but he ignores other factors and variables.....Outsourcing for example has done far more to stimulate new jobs in this country but he doesn't explore those issues...he just says...conservatives bad...liberals good. As you pointed out...It aint a zero sum game.

This guy wants to go back to the early days of the Unionized worker....ignoring the fact that organized crime made a sham of that noble banding of brotherhood. Aside from roughly a million jobs lost in the travel industry the US has grown more Jobs in the last 2 years...and there ARE good paying jobs that can be had....

I recently had a friend who was fired (due to a vendors incompetence..but thats a different story) who was out of work for a grand total of 7 days....he could have milked it and gone a year or more because we now have a really nice unemployment gig to take advantage of.....however, not being one to mooch off the public dole...he went out and got a job....he is making roughly 25% more than he was at my company......life in the US isn't the dead end some people on a particular side of the political spectrum would have you believe....oh it's not back to the booming 1990's level yet...but it aint too shabby either.


Yeah I could have organized this better...but Im tired.

[ 10-28-2004, 11:35 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[Aerich]

I am in complete agreement with Timber Loftis on every point he made in the above two posts (well, aside from the snide remark about the French).

The author has a couple of good points (labour farming out to nations with lower bottom lines), but tries hard to get to his conclusion. Two things grate on me: first, the incessant repetition of the term "cheap-labor conservative" is wholly unnecessary and is likely to alienate the very people he would need to persuade in order to get some change. It's also a cop-out. Just make up a derogatory label to describe people you don't like, then slot everyone you don't like (or agree with) into that category, and voila, you don't have to worry about thinking ever again.

The second thing that irritates me is the insinuation that union action is the solution for the problems he points out; as it pertains to unions, I have exactly the same opinion as Timber. I live in a union-heavy province. Unions play dirty pool just as much as corporations; they tend to strike early and often to blackmail their employers; they protect the worst idiots in the world from being fired, just because of the idea that every union member has to keep their job on the grounds that the employer can never "win"; they stifle the upward movement of capable workers because of tenure, and are the next worst thing to hierarchical nobility because of that structure.

Now I'm not altogether against unions. I certainly appreciate the impact they've had historically on working conditions and the good they've done in many areas. I've been a member of one, and was thankful for the increased wages and guarantee of fair employment practices. However, I also saw WAY too many people take advantage of that; unions can lead to inefficiency and increased costs to the employer well beyond the somewhat elevated costs of higher wages, safe working environments, and provision of benefits.

In addition, the practice of "bumping" is absolutely destructive and one of the worst things EVER to be written into a union contract. I don't know how many unions do it (maybe most of them?), but one is too many. It goes as follows: when a business downsizes, they have to fire the least-experienced workers first. Ok. The only way a less tenured worker can retain their job is if a higher-ranked worker is deemed not to be able to do the job. So, what you end up with is a situation where a capable person who is experienced in their exact job is "bumped" out by another person, who in all likelihood has to be trained for the position. In a bad scenario, the new person will be bumped out a few weeks later by a higher-ranking worker who will have to be trained from the beginning. So what you end up with is a person who is less skilled at the job than the original worker and may also be resentful of having to do a more "menial" or lower-status job than they had previously. Blah.

I suppose this deserves a [img]graemlins/rant.gif[/img] - I've never been bumped (my unionized positions were strictly temporary summer-job affairs), but I've seen the destructive impact it has had recently. Morale is rock-bottom low in many areas, and productivity only slightly higher.

Anyway, the above article is facile, has a certain axe to grind, and fails to convince me on the merits of many points. Just like most articles I read from the other end of the spectrum.

[Sir Kenyth]

Aerich- Unions have their place and time. Once they become counter productive and inhibit a performance related rewards system, they are no longer an asset to anyone. At the same time, although tenure can be abused, it protects those that have put their life into a company from being "let-go" because they are grandfathered in under a retirement plan that the company doesn't like. It happens. As people, we seem to have a problem with "balance of power". That's why maintaining a balance is so important to the health of the economy. Employers will always look for more work for less wages and employees will always look for less work for more wages. Anything that empowers one, works against the other. The funny thing is, both need the other to survive.

MagiK- I know that we are a large and rich enough economy that job losses will eventually be compensated for in other areas. But the same can be said for keeping the jobs here, can't it? Keeping jobs here and wages up isn't going to collapse the economy. The economy will compensate, right? The flip side is that it will keep more money in the hands of the workforce and give less to investors. The short term returns for any action go to someone. Most likely, the action won't collapse the economy in the long term, but someone sure benefits or it wouldn't be done. In the case of outsourcing jobs to cheap third world labor, the savings are reflected in increased profits. This means more money for investors and upper level execs. That's the plain and simple reason why it's done. The now unemployed workers will be reabsorbed into the economy somewhere right? Someone will eventually hire them to do something. Just not anyone who can save by outsourcing! In the interim, the workforce suffers for it though. You seem to favor trickle-down economics. The workforce generally favors trickle-up economics. The money all goes into the economy. It's all just a matter of whose hands the money starts off in. Where you want it to start off depends on what you do for a living and whether you have investments.


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As far as the guy who writes this article goes, he does like name-calling and assigning labels. I won't say it's right. Passionate politcal writing is designed to rile people up though. He's not the only one though, and liberals aren't the only group. The reason this article struck me so is, even though it's a little over the top, I think it speaks mostly the truth.

[ 10-29-2004, 12:33 PM: Message edited by: Sir Kenyth ]

[Azred]

Originally posted in the article presented via Sir Kenyth: What sort of "personal responsibility" is possible in such an environment? If a wage earner's only asset is his ability and willingness to do a day's work for a day's pay, where does he get the wherewithal to improve his circumstances? He gets that wherewithal from the wages he earns. But in the environment created by conservatives, that wage scale will not support accumulatioon of any savings. It will not support job training or higher education. It will allow the wage earner to survive -- in an economic environment where he lives paycheck to paycheck, hoping he doesn't lose his job.

The author seems to think "personal responsibility" is something bad, at least as framed in the wording of the article. Personal responsibility is the only source of power or control an individual employee has! Besides, if I am finding my wherewithal to improve my circumstances from my wages, then I need to seek psychiatric counsel.
If I want to improve my financial status then I must either take on a part-time job, find a way to lower my expenses, or both; this is in addition to trying to save as much as possible for the future. No one else will do this for me, and that is personal responsibility.
Despite the fact that I am not a member of the "financial elite", I still have a very conservative economic viewpoint because I know that financial responsibility hurts in the beginning, but I have a long-term vision. (that, and a lottery ticket [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img] [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

[Aerich]

Sir Kenyth - true, you have a point. Perhaps I was too one-sided in my criticism of the union-management relationship. However, the unions in my province were terrifically strong up until a few years ago. To the point where it inhibited efficiency; not just a little, a lot. Also, the wage divide between unionized workers and non-unionized workers doing the same job was, and remains, very substantial. Perhaps that's also a reflection on current wage situations, but...

I do actually agree with much of the assessment of the situation by the article's author. He does a good job picking out the weaknesses in the corporate structure. However, he has weakened his overall argument by the terminology he uses and because of a couple other things.

1) He does not see the other side of limited liability corporations; granted they can be abused, but they also allow the average wage earner to invest without fear of losing everything; similarly, they allow the higher wage earner and serious financier to invest without the risk of losing anything more than their original investment.

2) This point is tied to the first, in the sense that the author has missed a "good" feature of the results of the corporate structure. He claims that:

the largest beneficiaries of all government built infrastructure, including hydroelectric dams, railroads, air traffic control systems, and even roads and schools, are the corporations who buy power, transport goods by rail and over the roads, and employ workers educated at public expense...

In my opinion, this is a debatable claim. Granted, corporations make some money off of these things, but look at the value to the "Joe Citizen" in society. Hydroelectric dams provide energy to fuel lights and appliances, railroads provide (relatively) cheap shipping, air traffic control systems provide safety for Joe when he takes the airplane, Joe uses the roads too, and his children are educated at school. Yes, there's no way to calculate the monetary benefit to him, but those things certainly make life easier for him.

Without some form of limited liability, these things might not ever exist, or at the least, might not be cheap enough to be in widespread use.

Sir K. I don't think we can keep the jobs here, now that we have subjugated our selves to the Global Economy. With other nations using their governments to subsidize their industry to far greater extents than would be allowed in the USA and the WTO makes it hard to see how we can have decent jobs and wages when labor is cheaper elsewhere. So short of working for slave wages here in the states there has to be job loss to other nations.

This by the way is not something a single president or senator can fix.

[Sir Kenyth]

Subjugating ourselves to the world economy by diving in head first is part of the problem. I didn't particularly like it from the get-go. As you say though, the worms have long since fled this opened can. The only answer is controlling it to some extent. Just as tangible goods imports should be tariffed to some degree, so should outsourced labor. The only way to do that is to require the foreign businesses to pay minimum wages and have safe work environments for the workers. In other words, they have to operate under a similar ethic as US businesses. Any product from overseas work, tangible or intangible should be tariffed accordingly as an import.

Another point is I remember someone saying, "A good/service is worth only what the market can sustain; if Indians supply decent code for $0.85 / hr, then that's all decent code is worth."

I correct that statement by adding, "that's all decent code is worth IN THAT COUNTRY." I'm sure that a country that subscribes to slavery could drive prices down even further! It is not a level playing field once you leave our borders. It's a bit unethical to take advantage of poor working conditions and a lack of environmental pollution controls to make a buck or two unless you make a valid attempt to better those problems. My impression of the current state of affairs is that price/product is the only considered factor right now.

[ 11-01-2004, 11:53 AM: Message edited by: Sir Kenyth ]

I see a lot of code from India...let me tellya...most of it isn't worth the 85 cents. We outsourced a lot of our coding to india...and then hired a whole team of coders to correct the code here in the states...Im trying to figure out how the "suits" justify having fired our coders for the Indians....and then re-hiring the same coders as contractors to fix the poor code that gets imported....not only does it not save them money...it costs them huge dollars in delayed rollouts....it really is pathetic.