Posted on 11/24/2010 10:49:56 PM PST by Robwin
I remember the 1959 steel strike. I lived in Duluth, Minnesota at the time, and it was front-page, life-and-death news to the folks up there. I remember how the Belgians got into the US steel market during the strike -- that was the first crack in the dam. Before that, US steel consumption was ~100% US-made steel.
But consider -- whether it's Belgian steelmakers or Airbus/EADS breaking into civil and even AWACS and tanker manufacturing, it's always government-supported "fascist" outfits shooting at American companies with socialist support.
They arbitrage their government-supported cost structures against free-market US prices.
Even Mexico does this, at the bottom of the labor market, when they export workers here to send their US paychecks (however shrunken by advantage-taking employers) home to their hard-rock hometowns in Old Mexico. Workers arbitrage their wages and living conditions against government-subsidized living costs at home (remember the tortilla riots?), which are subsidized in the first place to advantage Mexican cartelists like Carlos Slim. Why do so many Mexican men prefer work as American stoop labor or drug-cartel pistoleros to working for people like Slim?
US companies that opened plants in Mexico in the 90's while closing US plants were playing the same game: they were arbitraging Mexican social subsidies and living costs and seeking to participate indirectly in the Mexican government's socialist handouts. That was how they could (according to a Business Week article in 1994 or 1995) employ a Mexican welder all week for $75 plus car fare and taco lunch. The guy BW's man visited was living in a dirt-floor cement shack with his pregnant wife, two kids, and mother-in-law. Ford loved this guy and was ecstatic over their "savings".
People don't consider the labor-subsidy aspect of international wage competition when they talk about US labor costs. And the US business community and RiNO Republicans are not incented to enlighten them. Why Dim labor unions didn't talk about it more is beyond me -- chalk that up to "corrupt and asleep at the switch", or maybe "haven't really cared since about 1954".
Either way, with Tea Party people ready to bring the immigration issue and international "free" (partly) trade issues to the fore, maybe we'll get that national discussion now.
I support it.
Globalist intrnationaql gangster corporations are responsible for collusion with the Wahhabis, stealing American jobs and sending them to Red China, importing cheap illegal labor and bankrolling politicians who support the UN, globalism and ineternationalism.
“Maybe I misunderstand your point but are you saying unions should be illegal? “
No, people have the right to freedom of assembly, but forcing employees to join them should be illegal, and forcing employers to negotiate with them should be illegal, and government employees should be banned from collective bargaining, and all employees and employers should be individually free to negotiate their own contracts of employment. If they want to do that collectively, fine, just don’t require employers to negotiate with them if they don’t want to.
I think they tried that approach once.
and what was the result?
Unions and overbearing federal labor law. So not to confuse, I'm basically with you on this issue.
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