There was a time (a long time ago now) when the Democrat Party characterized itself as the party of the little guy. They had the unqualified support of organize labor. In those days, you could have called it the “Labor Party” or the “Worker’s Party”, and wouldn’t have been wrong. I will part from the opinion of many of you who read this blog and will support organized labor of the 1930’s through the 1980’s. No, I don’t defend the current teacher’s unions, etc. However, organized labor, despite the mafia’s greasy claws in the pension funds, did help to give the working men and women of America a chance at a better wage, better working conditions and better retirement options than they would otherwise have. You can call it socialist if you want to, but helped to elevate the lives of many people.
President Johnson’s Great Society was a departure from the “old machine”, and was designed from the outset to keep a particular group of people poor and indebted to the New Democrat Party. Somehow that morphed into a weird mixture of a party steeped in racism, the unqualified support of sexual deviates and a variety of income distribution that would have made Marx proud – but was not ever part of the labor movement of America up through the Reagan years.
Today President John F. Kennedy would be considered to be an ultra-right wing extremist. Things changed, and they changed uncomfortably as a species of corrupt thug replaced representation of the American working class.
Today, the working class put President Donald Trump in the White House in an effort to defeat the creature that Washington had become. It is a creature that despises “fly over country” as a gaggle of “low lifes and deplorables”. That was not the old Democrat Party.
And in truth much of the core of the GOP is every bit as corrupt and rotten as the Democrat Party is.
I feel pretty much the same way about unions. They were definitely needed 'once upon a time', but now they've pretty much been neutered, and have their own unique caste system and brand of corruption.
I agree about unions being a necessity back in the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Today, not so much. And, yes, there is rot in the GOP, but not to the level of the dems. The dems have elevated the rot in their party to an art form.
They neutered themselves. And I think that the hysterical Donkeys are doing much the same – turning themselves into mules.
Agreed. The Democrats have turned themselves into an insane brand of rabid creature.
Henry Ford offered high wages before the union.
The Flint plant hijacking was the birth of the UAW.
It was theft, plain as day.
Can't disagree with anything you say.
Good post and I 2nd WSF.
Agree with all, and this is just the perfect rationale for term limits…
Term limits are a good idea for ALL politicians. And they really hate them because just when they feel embedded and when they're starting to make a lot of outside money, the gravy train ends. But that's what the founding fathers intended. I don't think that they envisioned what we have become… or maybe they'd have stayed British.
I tend to think of unions as being something that can't last in the real world. Start with the premise that salaries and benefits get negotiated. No business buys anything without negotiating the best terms it can get, right? Labor has every right to expect to negotiate and do so. Labor is, after all, a major cost for corporations.
As always, nobody says, "and then what?" and tries to think ahead. When labor gets a pay raise it's like the cost of any other raw material in their products just went up. Just like the company is bound to find another source (seller) or another material to use in the part, the company has an incentive to find the lowest cost way to produce their product. They're going to outsource to someplace where the labor is cheaper, reduce the amount of labor needed by redesign (if possible) and everything they can do to bring that cost of labor down. Like any other cost.
In the long run, the things the company make are only worth so much to customers. If labor raises the cost too much, just as if the cost of raw materials went up too much, sales go down, jobs go down and all that. They can price themselves out of the market.
Meanwhile, non-unionized industries see the benefit of raising wages and benefits to attract better workers. The union eventually gets pinched off and don't offer anything substantive.
It's why the stronghold of unions now is in heavily protected industries and those with no competition: your utilities, your government workers, the heavily protected car makers and such.
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