History and Politics
Michael said:
Is making your business more efficient and firing the unneeded labor 'fcuking over the worker'?
Your question is entirely political and ignores history.
In Seattle, for instance, the stevedores moved to unionize because they needed to protect their very lives. Bosses expected ships to be loaded with timber in such a manner that many workers were injured and maimed, and the ownership's response was, simply, to cut those people loose. Coal ships suffered dust explosions on a regular basis. It cut profits too much to load ships safely.
Conditions like these at ports around the country demanded some sort of response.
PJ refers to history. You refer to a political argument.
The historical reality is that government gets complicated because of corruption. It is easy enough to rail against that corruption when it is found in government, but it's somehow violative to complain when it's the company bosses? How does that work?
You'll find in Marx's footnotes for
Capital an event reported from Scotland in which a terrible train accident occurred because the brakeman completely screwed up. Then again, he had been on shift for over twenty-nine hours when he made the fatal mistake.
Children working dangerous, maiming jobs in mining operations? Women in matchstick factories sealing the matches by licking the tips?
Workplace safety regulations exist because they are needed.
And while it is true that unions could be a little more flexible about various aspects of reality, they've spent the last thirty years taking the brunt of people's outrage, making all sorts of concessions, and in the end it is still somehow wrong to expect company bosses, owners, and investors to act in good faith. Unions have no reason to expect that concessions will be met in good faith.
In the Hostess case? We're talking about a company that has been dancing around bankruptcy for over a decade, yet still found the money to give executives all sorts of raises.
Think of it this way: While union membership has plummeted in recent decades, real wages have also stayed flat. Yet if the unions are achieving benefit increases for their workers, we must acknowledge the point that in order to keep a flat average, non-union workers must be losing ground. And that is how the wider model works. In order to stay competitive, a company must work to pay its labor force less. This is the model that executives and investors have built.
In the end, though, I don't know any American who would agree to the labor conditions Twinkies would be made under if Grupo Bimbo bought up Hostess and took the operation south. And I know damn well that no American worker would accept for themselves, or aspire for their children, the conditions that make Foxconn attractive to Apple.
Our commercial marketplace has carried on this fight for centuries, now, and it's always the same argument.
Meanwhile, I haven't eaten Wonder bread for years. As a kid I ate this mass-produced stuff called Home Pride. These days, I eat sourdough from local manufacturers. Two hundred fifty jobs in Seattle are lost? That's a shame, but aside from that, the loss of Hostess doesn't really mean much to me; I haven't used their products in years.
Indeed, I would suggest, looking around at the people I know, that Hostess suffers to some degree from the same malaise that hit Detroit; the products don't have as wide of appeal, and the company hasn't adapted. Once upon a time, people ate a lot of Wonder bread. And, once upon a time, people bought a ludicrous number of Dodge Aries K automobiles.
