I think it because that's what's been happening. Since the time unions started losing membership and power, the 1970s, the gap between wages and productivity has been steadily increasing whereas before wages and productivity moved pretty much in tandem. I'm not naive enough to think that's the only reason for the widening wage/productivity gap but I do believe it is a major one. After all when employers can keep workers disorganized it is much easier for them to keep wages artificially low along with not implementing other workplace enhancing items.
Union bashing only works if workers agree that the unions suck. And that is a problem caused by the unions looking out for their own existance, and spending all their money on political conquests, rather than working to actually help workers.
Meanwhile, workers are much more hurt by all the things that happen because unions get democrats elected.
Well, I won't argue that the Democrats have been great for workers, but they are a whole lot better towards workers than the current Republican party.
But if they could hire some out-of-work college dropout to do my job, that is exactly what the company should do. Companies are not welfare states. Of course, the consumer wins if the products are cheaper, except if the consumer loses their job because of cheap labor, they can’t afford the cheaper products.
Companies have by and large forgotten Henry Ford's old maxim. We are a consumer driven economy and the more companies withhold wage increases for their employees, i.e. consumers, than consumers will have less disposable income to spend on the company's products thus making management think that wages have to be slashed even more.
Do you want to see the economy recover quickly? Make companies put some of the trillions in cash they are hoarding into circulation.
My second job is a $10-an-hour part-time job I have one month a year, as a haunt monster at a theme park. They can’t fill all the positions at that price, but my guess is they don’t think the problem with hiring is the salary. It is a weird job, and physically demanding. In california, applicants line up ahead of time for the chance at getting auditions for this kind of job, but here in the east, even with unemployment high among young people, it just isn’t the job people are clamoring for.
If the company offered $100/hr do you think they'd have trouble filling the positions? If they wouldn't have trouble filling positions at $100/hr then their hiring problem is a wage issue and the equilibrium wage for that position lies somewhere between $10/hr and $100/hr.
If they offered $100 an hour, they’d go broke, and nobody would have a job. The math is easy enough. They open the park, people pay a certain amount to come in, they can pay the workers something less than that amount.
You didn’t explain why you think that it is “union-bashing” the hurt the unions, rather than the unions screwing up that LED to union-bashing. My argument is that unions lost their way, and became less useful to workers, and that’s why they lost members.
We bash unions because they aren’t really helping their people, and instead are using their political influence to take away the freedom of workers to CHOOSE to represent themselves. They fight to stop right-to-work states, and to collect union dues from people taking care of their parents in their homes.