Solidarność.
No, there isn't. The causation is self-evident, and also unsurprising since it's the whole point of unions.
Of course, the GP might be from a country with another experience.
Contrast that with countries where unions (like health care) are not tied to an employer. The whole dynamic is very different, and I think less adversarial between unions and employees.
In the US if you have a problem with your union, you are out of luck. Make waves, and the union will make your life hell. It's a second layer of rent seeking management.
Ever since the SEIU tried to take a cut of all government benefits to families who care for disabled people in MN, it was obvious that unions here exist to serve only themselves.
It was a moment in history that will not repeated in any of our lifetimes. Anything else against this backdrop is basically a rounding error.
I was alive during the drawdown of US industrial capacity and my entire family was blue collar mostly union workers. In my teens and 20's I worked such jobs. This narrative still rings largely true to me. The amount of outright waste and fraud in these industries at the labor level was astronomical. We were begging to be outcompeted. Combined with managerial incompetence we were doomed.
Unless of course we have another world war, which isn't really unlikely.
As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other.
It’s easy to rag on unions, but usually that’s a surface complaint ignoring the factors causing it. Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones.
Totally this.
We can't pretend that the likes of Amazon et al haven't been repeatedly caught being openly hostile and extremely agressive towards any semblance of a labour rights organization within their workforce, with union busting strategies being discussed, planned, and executed at the VP level. They went as far as executing smear campaigns in the media targeting labour representatives and activists.
No one can claim that unions are in decline due to some unavoidable law of nature when huge multinationals once led by the richest man in the world invest so much time and effort and money at the VP level to sabotage them.
This is a concern troll. If you really cared about child labor abroad, you would unequivocally support globalization as parents don't want their kids to be slaves and more jobs in these countries gives parents more options. Child labor and slavery is caused by a lack of oversight more than anything else, and unions in the US won't help that.
You seem to be implying that colonization is synonymous with globalization, but let me dispel this notion. The problematic part of colonization were the protectionist aspects of it. The Congolese were unable to compete for the same administrative positions of that the Belgians enjoyed.
Now you tell me how unions in the US are supposed to help the DRC.
I said that globalization is an example of money driving policy at the exclusion of all else. High minded bullshit about resource extraction making your life better is similar to the bullshit narratives used as justification of colonialism.
I think the above comment is saying that we can have globalization and sane work conditions simultaneously.
This is an explicit policy choice by the ruling class, and has proven awfully convenient for the owning class.
Of course there is not one single factor determining the economic, technical and social development of countries over decades of time.
But the relationship between unions, the labor movement, and social democratic policies is obvious.
Those in turn have had a large impact on equality and standard of living.
The economy benefits from having a larger base of well off consumers, and a well educated, healthy, non-striking labor force. It's a self reinforcing positive spriral.
No there isn't. You just didn't read any of the links in the article that it used for support, IE https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...
> The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
You can't have it both ways in your argument. You set up an initial statement about high Union costs driving outsourcing, and then immediately drop that point as you pivoted to an argument about quality being the driver.
I'm going to stop you right there because that shows you're quite literally making this up based on feelings or beliefs. You're totally misrepresenting the history of labor unions. Labor unions were on the rise all throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/the-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
The "middle class" is a myth and is a propaganda tool for creating dissent. There are really only two classes:
1. Capital-owners. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc; and
2. Workers. This is anyone who trades their labor for an income. This covers everyone from the janitor to LeBron James.
The idea of the "middle class" is to create a division between them and the "lower class". The "middle class" often look down on the "lower class" and lump those who might rely on welfare, etc. The "lower class" will be blamed for many of society's ills.
The truth is there is no division. What you think of as the "middle class" and "lower class" are exactly the same and have way more in common than to the Musks, Bezos's and Buffett's of the world.
Billionaires have class solidarity. The dire situation of stagnant real wages and skyrocketing cost of living is largely a result of workers not having class solidarity.
I am far from alone. And the existence of people like me kind of blows up your neat theory.
You are the perfect example - someone who's managed to squairrel away a tiny fraction of the capital pie and now imagines himself to be in a different class.
Just because you now own a sandwind does not you a capitalism make.
Gousing prices are the cause of higher cause of manufacturing. I am not sure how noone is talking that a worker in the west cannot compete eith a worker in a developing country when his rent is 10x higher. Then peolle have the guts to blame unions.
The more competition recovered in Japan and elsewhere, the less bargaining power and surplus could be captured by Unions. The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
Even further, exorbitant labor costs make it worthwhile for manufacturers to do capital investments in automation, and we are seeing the output of that.
The rise in middle class should probably be attributed to investments - in equities, bonds, house purchases. Growing up in Eastern Europe, where only housing investment was an option, and unions were abundant, the middle class that sprouted came from those who invested in property and business. Labor union power and wealth was too politically and corruption influenced to be a sustainable source of growth for the country.