Posted on 06/06/2002 5:39:12 AM PDT by Rodney King
OK, how much is this living wage?
You are missing what I said earlier. EMPLOYERS WILL NOT PAY EMLPOYEES MORE THAN THEY ARE WORTH. End of story.
Ahhh. Great example. Even a flaming socialist like Henry eventually bends to the will of free-market capitalism.
How do you think he accomplished what he accomplished? By paying his wrench-toting monkeys $80k/yr? Or perhaps by manufacturing innovation that drove down the prices of his autos, making them affordable not just for his workers, but for middle-class Americans everywhere?
He could not have revolutionalized the auto industry and the manufacturing sector in general if he had to charge more for the Model T because his unskilled work force was making princly wages.
Capitalism at its finest.
Like the time I was in graduate school, and we (accidentally, I swear) shorted out the electric service to our lab. Well, nearly all the flourescent tubes blew, so we were sitting around in the dark (our usual state of being, BTW). My advisor wanted to know why we weren't changing the light bulbs ourselves...
That was months after the organic division people in the lab above ours had had a slight water leak. They rained overnight into our lab in the basement. So we show up one morning to see our instruments adrift at sea. Okay, we (the other grad student and I) get a mop and start swabbing. Oh! You'd think I was taking lollipops from babies, to hear Facilities crying over us mopping our own floor...
I knew this would happen.
I was working as an underground miner at the Atomic Test Site, at Mercury, Necvada, and was on a crew drilling and installing rock bolts. After we got the holes drilled and bolts in and torqued we had to put a plate over the hole collar and insert a 1/2-inch diameter, 6-inch long tube through the plate so we could then grout the holes. You guessed it, the pipe fitters went out on strike because the miners were doing this little task.
When I worked at Mercury, the site used to average one day per week of strike shutdown...the union goons used to laughingly refer to this as "wobling the job".
Since when did Chemists learn how to mop floors??
Unfortunately, you're not going to get that answer. And, of course whatever it is, it will increase each year. The goal is simply to keep acheivers from gaining any wage advantage over the deadbeats. (in other words, socialism) In the mind of the liberal, a burger flipper with 8th grade education is equal in earning power to a steel worker which is equal to a rocket scientist.
The market ultimately sets the wages. Look at our industrial base; in many cases, we have priced ourselves out of work. We have set (through the short-sightedness of union demands) our costs so high that many manufacturing companies have found that it is cheaper to do so overseas. It isn't just wages that contribute to this; regulations, quotas, and the inability to fire deadbeats is also a major factor. Businesses are no different than most people; they aren't dumb enough to pay $30 for a $10 part.
I don't blame the unions for demanding astronomical increases in wages and benefits and feather-bedding contract language. Even if management agrees to only half or less of the demands, the union is farther ahead than they were before. The unions are looking out for themselves, in their own short-sighted way. The bargaining agent doesn't care. He doesn't work for the company who employs the union members.
If government would just stay out of the way and let firms riddled with a history of bad decisions in contract negotiations naturally founder under the weight of their self-imposed inefficiences, maybe everyone else would get the message. Once everyone starts looking long-term, everyone will make money.
Wage controls destroy jobs, and take away opportunity from those who want and need it most.
This sounds like the same stuff we heard before Ronald Reagan made the statement that "Nobody is going to be starving in America". And, he was right; nobody did. We heard it again when the Republican congress presented a welfare reform bill to Bill Clinton (which he surprisingly signed). And yet, nobody is starving.
We have tons of illegal immigrants flooding over our borders to take on those "less than living wage" jobs that supposedly nobody wants. And, they seem to be living on them and have enough to send a few dollars back to Mexico to finance the next flood.
As far as "union goons" threatening violence to get their way, it sounds a lot like Jesse Jackson's antics. The problem here is that violence will bring on counter violence. I am a firm believer in the second amendment and the right to self defense. So send your terrorist goons over here.
Now, don't get me wrong; I have nothing against collective bargaining, but I also have nothing against people choosing to bargain for themselves as an individual. People have the right to associate freely with whomever they wish. And, if they wish to stop working, by all means let them do so. And if they wish to convince others that their cause is rightious, by all means let them do so. But the minute they threaten other people or other people's property, they are out of line. And the minute they try to prevent someone from working if they choose to do so, they are out of line.
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