I thought you might all like this post from anther group (esp. Ron Getty, based upon earlier "union" related posts).
Rich
Dear Rich and The Rest of You;
To paraphrase something for the benefit of Andy Stern of the AFl-CIO
so he can understand what is happening: " We have met the enemy and
it is us ". Or in pure economic terms there is a poor resource
allocation of limited resources going to areas of less productivity
per worker. And the wage earner and consumer pays the price.
When you inflate union wages through collecitve bargaining
procedures where the wages are above the free-market wages for the
same positions you create some of the following: less workers hired
because of the higher wages, less hired workers doing less
productive work, unless there is heavy capitalization of the
industry so the output is created through the capitalization not
through out right productivity, the cost of the goods produced are
higher for the consumer and there is lesser chances of the goods
being high quality if there was true free market wage competition
among competitors. The alternate also applies where there is an
agreement among manufacturers to keep wages artifically low. Once
again there will be a poor allocation of limited resources to a less
productive worker.
Then the people who are not hired at the higher union wages seek
other jobs and are less productive in relation to open market wages
where there is basically a floor on wages.
Then in answer to his statements about not understanding what should
be basic free market economy he only has to look at the protective
tariffs, protective labor laws, huge taxes on productivity of any
kind to fuel an insatiable government tax system gone wild. The more
capital which is sucked out of the economy in taxes the less capital
there is for expanding industry and opening new business and
plants.
Lastly, as noted in the article, we do not have so much to fear from
private industry labor unions but governmental employee labor
unions. As they are the fastest growing union labor sectors. These
workers are hired with tax payer dollars and face no competition at
all in the market place.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
--- In lpsf-discuss@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Newell" <richard@n...>
wrote:
I thought you might all like this post from anther group (esp. Ron
Getty, based upon earlier "union" related posts).
Rich
From: dcrealtornw@a...
To: GayLibertarians@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Foxhall69gtown@a...
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 3:06 PM
Subject: [GayLibertarians] (no subject)The cat is out of the bag
Linda ChavezJuly 28, 2004
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/lindachavez/lc20040728.shtml
The Democratic Party is a "stale party of ideas." That surprising
assessment
comes not from a conservative critic but from one of the Democrats
most
stalwart supporters, Andrew Stern, the president of the largest
union in the
AFL-CIO, the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International
Union (SEIU). Stern
set off a huge controversy when he spoke to the Washington Post's
David Broder
and Thomas Edsall on the first day of the Democratic convention,
and he has
since been backtracking on his statements -- with some difficulty
since they
were caught on tape and are readily available on the Post's
Website.
But what Stern said should come as a big surprise not just to the
Democratic
Party but to union members, given the huge amount of their dues
that will be
directed toward electing Democrats this election. Unions will
spend an
estimated $800 million to defeat President Bush and other
Republicans in 2004 -- $60
million of which will come from Stern's own SEIU and at least
another $35
million from one local in that union, Local 1199, in New York
City.
Stern, who has been speaking out for weeks now about what he
seems to
believe is a sclerotic labor movement, hit some raw nerves in his
comments to the
Post. He said, for example, "We can't talk about education. . . We
can't discuss
when it is failing our members (children) in public schools in
urban areas.
You know, we're the experiment. Maybe vouchers aren't the only
answer, but
then, what is? I'm tired of hearing if we just pay teachers more,
you know life
will be terrific. It's a huge problem."
Of course he's right. Just as he is when he describes the
inability of the
government to regulate the U.S. economy, which he admits is "too
big. You can't
regulate an American economy without markets. ... " He accurately
describes
his fellow Democrats' understanding of the economy: "We don't
understand
markets, we don't understand employers, we don't understand
competition; we don't
understand globalization; we don't understand how wages are set in
an economy."
Stern's solution is a bigger role for unions, which he describes
as "a
market force" in regulating wages. The problem is, unions have
virtually given up
their original mission of organizing new members and representing
them at the
bargaining table. Even though unions have taken in more than $17
billion every
year in members' dues, they spend the lion's share of that
treasury on bloated
bureaucracies and political action. Union membership has declined
precipitously in recent years, from a high of 35 percent of the
workforce in the
mid-1950s to the current rate of just 13 percent, and only 8.2
percent of private
sector workers. Stern's union is one of the few in the AFL-CIO
that is growing.
Although Stern's union represent both public and private sector
members, the
SEIU has actually gained members among janitors and other low-wage
workers in
recent years -- making it a rarity in organized labor circles. But
nearly
one-in-two union members today works for government at some level:
local, state or
federal.
Private sector union members are paying higher taxes to fund Big
Government,
which may benefit public sector unions but does little to help
working men
and women who don't work for government. Janitors in Stern's
unions are paying
more out of their paychecks so that already well-paid, college-
educated
government workers can get even more in theirs. Worse, the
services these government
workers provide are declining in quality -- as Stern suggests when
he talks
about American education.
Stern has let the cat out of the bag. Big Labor's ties to the
Democratic
Party aren't exactly helping working men and women. So why do
Stern and his
fellow union presidents insist on taking union members' dues to
fund the Democrats?
I wish Andy Stern would answer that question.
Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a
Townhall.com