- Organized labor: good for more than just "getting yours" –
"The classic argument for unionization is that acting together, workers have a stronger negotiating hand than workers acting alone, negotiating individual contracts. That's demonstrably true. But it also works in the other direction. When the time calls not for soaking as much profit out of the company as possible, but for making some sacrifices, out of loyalty and a sense of shared economic destiny, unions can do that too."Schmitt's observation parallels a point made repeatedly in the work of the brilliant Thomas Geoghegan, that the American labor movement at its post-WWII peak was, for all its flaws, a mechanism by which millions of people learned how to do civic participation–how to negotiate, horse-trade, and persuade.Losing that mechanism wasn't just a blow to hazy ideals of social justice. It was also a blow to American society's practical ability to function, to our ability to negotiate among ourselves. Like all attempts to radically simplify society (think of Henry VIII breaking up the monasteries), the largely-successful war against American unions has left us all fundamentally stupider, less capable of working complex problems out.
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- Should the 80s come back? A fair and balanced analysis. –
- CNBC: Wall Street companies can’t be run well by people making less than $250K – Man, you’d think CNBC host Mark Haines is living in some parallel universe where the economy was f*cked up by minimum wage workers. He insists, in this clip via Think Progress, that you need to pay these performance-deficient executives more than 98% of the U.S. population because…well, they must be brilliant or something. WTF?
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