In light of the Union diaries over the past few days, I thought I would share the contents of a post I made a few months back to a forum of highly technical people. I hope you like it.
Whenever you get a situation where a few people have bread they are looking to distribute, and many people are hungry, people are willing to fight for scraps. And the person dispensing the bread can give out smaller and smaller scraps of bread, and the people who are hungry will still fight for them. When the dust settles, the people who get the bread will be happy and the people who do not will not be. The fact of the matter is that the scrap of bread will not fill the belly of the person who gets the scrap much better than the person who does not. Things will be better for the scrapful than the scrapless, but, when you come right down to it, to the guy who has the loaf, one person willing to fight for a scrap is just as good as the next, and if they settle for a smaller scrap, it's better for him as he gets to keep more bread. And, really, the fate of the rabble fighting for the bread is not his concern: there are always more people willing to fight for scraps. This is the model of American Capitalism.
At the beginning of the last century, the American worker got wise to this, and formed Unions. With a Union, the workers could bind together and say that they want a larger piece of bread. For awhile, they were getting a lot of friction from the people with no bread saying that any bread is better than no bread and that if they didn't want the bread, the breadless would take it, that the people with the small scraps of bread were just greedy. It took many years and many lives to teach people that the only way to get more bread was to get it from the guys with the loaves rather than the guys with the ittybitty scraps. And, until the 1980s, American wages rose. Working conditions improved. The work week got shorter. Not just for Union people, for everyone. As the Unions declined in strength, American wages stagnated. The work week got longer. As the Unions started dying, fewer and fewer people were doing more and more work, time off started decreasing, and real wages started to plummet. Again, not just for the Union people. For people like you and me. Even as there is more computer work than you can shake a stick at, consulting wages have decreased 40%, and salaried work has dropped 20%. And you're not going to be home at 5 and take summers off to vacation with your family. Those days are gone.
And why?
Because American industry has found more hungry people. More people willing to fight for a scrap of bread. It's not that the American worker is getting paid too much. It is that the Chinese worker is getting paid too little. And, when the Chinese workers finally realize that part of being communist is that the worker is supposed to get a larger percentage of the profits generated by his labor, American industry will go elsewhere to find more hungry people, and Chinese wages will go down too.
But, realize that by the time that the Chinese wages go down, our nice high western wages will have plummeted. This is global wage arbitrage and will eventually stabilize when we're all starving together, and the people with the loaves of bread have bigger loaves than they've ever had before and the rest of us are living in a Dickensian nightmare complete with pollutions, dispair and disease.
And the only way THE ONLY WAY to stop this is by forming international Unions that equalize wages across industries so that it is not cheaper to produce a product in this country than in that. Wages in America and England and Israel will drop, but not as quickly nor as drastically as if the international unions do not exist, and the wages in Ethopia and Sudan and China and India will skyrocket overnight, generating more desire to buy the expensive products that we Americans have been enjoying for 50 years or better (refrigerators, washing machines, cars), which, in turn, generates more profits, and spawns global hiring and a global increase in living, and, of course, globally, lower unemployment and higher wages. Almost overnight.
But it's not going to happen. Unions, after all, are bad, and evil and corrupt. Just ask the bad, evil, corrupt people who keep saying it. Strangely, those are the very people who want us fighting amongst ourselves for scraps of bread.
And again, what the monied idiots don't realize is that they are breeding the beast that will eat them too. They do this a lot. In this case, the American consumer has given these greedy jerks the biggest loaves of bread the world has ever seen, and, in the search of even bigger loaves, the guys with the bread go to China or India to get cheaper labor. What they don't realize is, without paychecks, the American consumers will not keep buying their product, and, eventually, even the richest people will suffer. What they also don't realize is that, when the American worker is fat and happy, he's willing to pay a little more for his "stuff" and they could get a bigger loaf not by producing it more cheaply but by selling it more dearly. And they don't see that the better they treat their worker, the more they pay him, the better off, they too will be. The rich get richer when the poor have money to give them. And, once again, we're all in it together.