Year: 2015

Many Americans, in their immeasurable wisdom, support the war on labor.  They despise many of the vile things unions and labor rights provided: high wages, benefits, workplace safety.  These efforts raised the price of goods right, made it harder for American corporations to compete?  Pensions almost put several companies and municipalities in bankruptcy.  Labor rights, as so many Americans assert, set the stage for U.S. corporations and local governments to fail.  Damned unions!

We don’t need labor laws because the “free market” handles all of those things labor advocates are concerned about (the simpleton version, dumbed down for easy digestion):

• The market will dictate an employees value, no union representation is required to insure a living wage.
• Employer sponsored benefits only hurt a companies bottom line.  Don’t like your benefits, quit and get another job.  Or the universal old, ignorant, white guy solution: start your own business.  Everyone can work for themselves!  That’s realistic, sound advice.  No?
• Workplace safety is self correcting, if a company has an accident their workman’s comp insurance will go up so they have an inherent duty to a safe workplace.

Now lets return to reality.

It was indeed union negotiation that lead to the real problem, the pension, not workers rights.  America has a pension problem, not a labor problem.  Someone damn sure needs to be advocating for higher wages because Big Corp., Inc. and their masters, Wall St. shareholders, certainly aren’t.  America needs to return to being a model of stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder.  Customers and employees should be every companies first priority, not insuring returns to the “hard working” investors (the wealthiest of whom never worked a hard day in their lives).

Instead Americans fill their heads with corporatist propaganda from Fox News as they correlate anti-abortion legislation to vile labor laws.  They get their heads programmed to believe that “union thugs” are responsible for the downfall of GM.  While partially true due to pension negotiations, shitty, gas guzzling cars and recalls remain the true reason GM can’t get out of the red.  There I go with reality again.  We’re all supposed to ignore that, it’s called denial.

So, if we are going with “the rich are powerful, we should worship them because they earned it” let’s at least be honest about what conservative, anti-labor advocates really want; a class system.  Americans want haves and have-nots.   No middle class, nothing to insure fair wages, no upward mobility and definitely no job security.  No, we want “right to work” states.  Let me translate “right to work”.  Despite semantics and double talk explanations “right to work” really means right to fire your ass for any reason at all without liability.  Hell yes.  What a win!  That way entrepreneurs and businesses don’t have to worry about insuring employment.  They can downsize at any time so our businesses (never forget we are all independent owners/operators or “corporate persons” in America… or you’re supposed to be) can insure those guaranteed returns to the shareholders.

Yes, America hates labor.  We hate the labor movement, working for honest wages, we hate being a burden to corporations because they are people with feelings too.  We hate labor because liberals and progressives support the labor movement and they’re all going to hell in an abortion basket.  Labor is evil because it’s possible shareholders could actually face risks on their investments.  Better the wealthy investors and Wall St. have insured returns than employees have living wages.

Record profits. If that doesn’t work then record quarterly profits. Not making profit? Then try for some record revenue to reach record profits. Got decent profit? Get more.

This is the model of the retail industry. This model hits everyone in the economy on some level regardless of how distanced they perceive themselves to be from the drive for more profit under any circumstances by retailers. We already know that almost every product in America has been off shored for manufacturing thanks to the retailers demands for increased margins. This is one of the obvious costs to US workers and the economy. There are less obvious and more ominous tactics used by retailers to increase profit at the expense of working Americans.

Here’s one example: the price of cotton. A year ago it was trading in the mid $90’s/100 lbs. It’s now down in the mid to low $80’s. When prices rose retailers raised the price of everything from garments to drop cloths to maintain their margins. Okay fine, their costs went up from their vendors. Now the raw materials price is dropping and the manufacturers, distributors and vendors are enjoying a few more points themselves, which is rare. Not so fast say the retailers, we want our price drop, based on raw materials cost, or you will lose our business to someone else willing to practically give us merchandise. Okay fine… vendors/distributors drop the price under retailer demands to keep the business. So as a consumer you should see your retail price go down in turn correct?  Wrong.

Retailers establish industry or product base lines of what consumers are willing to pay and they stick.  True, competitive discounts to consumers between retailers may cost them a point or two but it does not come close to the margin increases they enjoy as consumer prices rise and their procurement costs fall.  In short, most big boxes don’t pass savings on to their customers.   They pass them on to shareholders.  Once again shareholder capitalism rears it ugly head.  Stakeholders such as employees of Big Box, Inc. don’t enjoy wage increases along with product margin increases.   Customers don’t enjoy price breaks.  It’s Wall Street investors who enjoy the additional cash in the coffers and possible dividends.  Placing investors above all else, a relatively new part of the American experiment, is unsustainable and works to greatly exaggerate the growing inequality in the United States which, despite any argument against the poor and the reason for being so, will lead to the countries ultimate demise.  Stay tuned.