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Yeah that's great, except you can't offshore outsource lawn mowing

You can't offshore it? Maybe not. But you can still lose it. There are a slew of "undocumented workers" in most states (at least western and mid-western) who have those jobs: the blue-collar, low-income and unksilled labour jobs.

Proponents (not perhaps without some justification, I suppose) argue that since no Americans want to pick strawberries or mow lawns for a living, without the illegal/legal migrant workers, the work will never get done.

But how soon will it be before proponents of white collar outsourcing start saying that no American would want to do low level I/T Work - eg., Call Centers, 1st Line Tech Support, basic coding? I think it's already being said.

Those with the "have" are in a position to call the shots here. Or put another way, capitalism being tied to the private ownership of the means of production allows the private appropriation of surplus value. Companies outsource more for marginal benefits at best it seems, and yet nobody things to cut the salaries of the top executives?

If anyone thinks I'm taking this too far, then why are the CEOs and top executives of some of the companies responsible for the most outsourcing making millions of dollars? (Carly Fiona and Sam Palmisano).

Yeah that's great, except you can't offshore outsource lawn mowing

You can't offshore it? Maybe not. But you can still lose it. There are a slew of "undocumented workers" in most states (at least western and mid-western) who have those jobs: the blue-collar, low-income and unksilled labour jobs.

Proponents (not perhaps without some justification, I suppose) argue that since no Americans want to pick strawberries or mow lawns for a living, without the illegal/legal migrant workers, the work will never get done.

But how soon will it be before proponents of white collar outsourcing start saying that no American would want to do low level I/T Work - eg., Call Centers, 1st Line Tech Support, basic coding? I think it's already being said.

Those with the "have" are in a position to call the shots here. Or put another way, capitalism being tied to the private ownership of the means of production allows the private appropriation of surplus value. Companies outsource more for marginal benefits at best it seems, and yet nobody things to cut the salaries of the top executives?

If anyone thinks I'm taking this too far, then why are the CEOs and top executives of some of the companies responsible for the most outsourcing making millions of dollars? (Carly Fiona and Sam Palmisano).

The AFL-CIO might oppose outsourcing but they are perfectly happy to flood the domestic market with cheap labor through immigration. http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/immigration/n s01072004.cfm

He's close:

In 2003, the average CEO of a major company received $9.2 million in total compensation

From Here

On average they make 531 times the average Joe.

Nice huh?

In 1980 they made 42.

Money goes a lot farther when you throw it at programmer salaries than it does when you throw it at the execs.

Though maybe I'm just saying that because I program.

It's easy to resent union workers for having pay, benefits, and job security that other workers lack. But the solution to that is to strengthen unions, rather than weaken them. Higher union density means better wages, benefits, and conditions for everyone.

Compare the situation of workers in the U.S. to other industrialization nations with higher unionization rates, and you'll discover American workers are being seriously screwed.

Also consider the history of the United States. Appreciate the 40 hour work week? Think having a strong middle class has been good for the country? Thank the labor movement. It's not a coincidence that it's begun to disappear (real wages falling since the 1970s) at the same time as the unions have been weakened.

Check out the AFL-CIO's All About Unions page, and think seriously about the consequences of scabbing.

Unions should not be transient any more than the corporate hierarchy should be.

Unions collect dues from the worker exactly as the corporation does. The entire corporate hierarchy is supported by the capital raised by the goods produced by the workers. How many profitable corporate hierarchies without workers have you seen?

Finally, unions are unpopular with businesses because they raise the salary of employees (not because they bring up piddly requests). A union diverts an enormous amount of money going to a very few people and distributes it equitably among those who are actually performing the work.

How much is your CEO making? Go here and find out. The CEO of my company made over $20M last year. (That's more money than I'll make in 200 years.) If my CEO and board of directors took a 50% paycut, they could afford to give everyone in the company an extra two weeks of paid vacation. If 20 outrageously overpaid people took a 50% paycut, a 100,000 people could spend two extra weeks a year with their families. That's why we need permanent unions.

Here's the wsj article(for subscribers).

An interesting paragraph-
"According to the filing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made $ 250,000 in salarly and got a $301,556 bonus last year, plus other compensation of $2,894. Co-founders Mr. Brin, now president of technology and Mr. Page, now president of products, both got salaries of $150,000 and bonuses of 206,556.".

And you can compare the pay with other US companies. Other companies can learn from google here.

For those worried that Google will become a wall street pawn, here's what the founders are doing about it-
"The offering documents were filed with a lengthy letter, called the "Owner's Manual" for the company. In it, co-founder Larry Page said he and co-founder Sergey Brin have worried that the "standard structure of public ownership may jeopardize the independence and focused objectivity that have been most important in Google's past success and that we consider most fundamental for its future."

As a result, the founders "have designed a corporate structure that will protect Google's ability to innovate and retain its most distinctive characteristics."
Part of that will be a dual-class structure, in which the founders will hold a higher-vote class of stock that will allow them to control much of the company's fate.".

Bottom line? Once you go public, wall street makes you ride to its tunes. Preventing that at google will establish it not only as the intelligent company but a financially astute one too.

Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available.
Any ideas what Google will do with the money it raises?

Many unions today are not healthy. By that I mean they do not represent their workers. They represent their interests. Kind of like a big government tends to represent it's existance instead of the people that pay for its existance.

jason

blakespot

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Bush rolled back ergonomic safety regulations and trivialized the nature of RSI.

It used to be possible to get your employeer to repair poor ergonomic conditions by law. It used to be easier to get compensiation and medical costs covered for these types of injuries. No longer. Thanks George!

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Bush rolled back ergonomic safety regulations and trivialized the nature of RSI.

It used to be possible to get your employeer to repair poor ergonomic conditions by law. It used to be easier to get compensiation and medical costs covered for these types of injuries. No longer. Thanks George!

What I'm wondering is: why aren't computer programmers organizing their programming shops to have some more collective bargaining power to prevent offshoring? Sure, we should have done it during the dot-com boom, but it's not too late.

The guy on the auto factory assembly line who sprays the new car smell on the upholstery has a better chance of keeping his job stateside than a C++ programmer with 20 years of experience. Why is that? Unions. Why don't we have one?

My mistake - I should have done more research before posting. Upon further digging, the wage gap varies from one profession to another. We earn 92 cents on the dollar at best. I guess I should be glad I'm not a physician, or I'd only be earning (on average) 58 cents on the dollar compared to men.

Here's a nice little table the AFL-CIO put together from US Department of Labor statistics, breaking down the wage gap by profession.

A flyer circulating around our Boston Public Library...

Is Big Brother Watching?

The union believes that the library is using
video surveillance to watch patrons and employees
in areas of the library.

The library will neither confirm nor deny
this.

The union is working with our legal department
to explore our options of recourse that you
and the patrons you serve may be illegally
videotaped.

Please Post

Boston Public Library Employees Local No. 1526
http://www.afscmecouncil93.org

logo http://www.afscme.org/images/2001s.jpg
American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO
http://www.afscme.org

American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations
http://aflcio.org

8 Beacon Street Boston Massachusetts 02108
Telephone 617 536 5400 ext 2311 Fax 617 262 5554

allied label http://www.alliedlabel.org/images/label.gif
ALLIED PRINTING TRADES COUNCIL 73
UNION LABEL
BOSTON MASS
http://www.alliedlabel.org

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_o f_Labor-Congress_of_Industrial_Organizations

Collaborative WebLog
A guide to problematical library use
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ faq
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.us
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.blog-city.co m

That quote really stuck out to me as well. In 2002, our friends Ms. Fiorna herself raked in $10,934,357 Think of how many jobs HP would be able to keep if she made half of that? Educated people working for minimum wage? That's preposterous for the industry to even come up with a statement like that. The industry apologists would crack me up if this wasn't so alarming.

Then explain why he imposed huge Steel Tariffs? Or why his party passed the largest government-subsidized Farm Bill ever seen in the history of industrial society. Or why it imposed tariffs on imported Candian Lumber?

This adminstration is about as Free Trade as the AFL-CIO is.

--

The bills to exempt some occupations from the minimum wage and overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, section 213 (FLSA) are S. 237 for certain construction engineers; S. 292 for funeral directors and licensed embalmers; and S. 495 for certain computer professionals.

Another pair of bills, H.R. 1119 and S. 317, would allow employers to give employees one hour of comp time in exchange for one hour of overtime, thus avoiding overtime pay completely. When you take the comp time is up to the employer and he has up to a year to give it. You leave the company before taking it, you lose it.

Also see: "Bush Proposal Could End Overtime Pay for Millions of Workers."

The bills to exempt some occupations from the minimum wage and overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, section 213 (FLSA) are S. 237 for certain construction engineers; S. 292 for funeral directors and licensed embalmers; and S. 495 for certain computer professionals.

Another pair of bills, H.R. 1119 and S. 317, would allow employers to give employees one hour of comp time in exchange for one hour of overtime, thus avoiding overtime pay completely. When you take the comp time is up to the employer and he has up to a year to give it. You leave the company before taking it, you lose it.

Also see: "Bush Proposal Could End Overtime Pay for Millions of Workers."

Must be a fairly new trend because this site kind of indicates otherwise. view from the other side

Hmmm, Fortune magazine this spring... No Shame

Oink! CEO pay still out of control"

Exactly which Fortune magazine did this pay reduction occur in??????????

..to repost this link.

Its the AFL-CIO's PayWatch resource. Find out the compensation disparity in your company.

Just one?

The Panama Canal.

Lockheed Martin's X-33 single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle concept.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor

The NEAR space probe (and it was delivered 9 months ahead of schedule!)

The World Trade Center recovery effort.

The US Navy's Super Hornet (upgrade to the old F/A-18 Hornet Naval strike fighter)

The U2 Spy Plane

Also, I remember hearing from the Discovery Chanel or TLC or Discovery Wings or something that the F-117 Stealth Fighter was developed under budget, but I can't seem to find a reliable link.

Golden Grove Prison at St. Croix in the US Vigrin Islands.

The Grand Staircase-Escalante monument in Utah.

It happens. It's rare percentage wise, but it does happen all the time. With the exception of the last two, which I only found out from google searching for links for the rest, I knew of all of these off of the top of my head, so it's not a big secret or anything. Just think of all the mundane projects that come in under budget too. Government buildings, roadways, etc.

As a former Chrysler assembly worker I can assure you that any savings from total automation would not be passed along to the consumer or to the remaining workers. I don't have very favorable impression of the unions either, but they're not the people responsible for the high auto prices. Why don't you check out some of the CEO's salaries . If you think the economy is in a recession now, just wait until a couple of hundred thousand people hit the unemployment lines. Maybe you'll have a different veiw on things when the layoffs hit you, but then again you're probably still living in Mommy and Daddys' basement.

Now take a look at the executive compensation for YAHOO for 2000. Looking at Koogle walking away with ~$30 million while the company looses it's shirt, you understand the name: "YAHOO, we can screw all the investors and employees!"

This sort of abridgment of freedom and individual liberties has become the hallmark of modern trade agreements. Corporations making big campaign contributions have taken control of the process, and have pushed the US Trade Representative to introduce all sorts of undemocratic and unethical provisions to trade agreements in secret negotiating sessions totally closed to public scrutiny or accountability. This is why there have been massive protests in Seattle, Quebec, and so many other places around the world.

The DMCA provisions are just one of the latest dirty little provisions added into these things. They also have provisions to gut environmental and safety standards, undermine workers rights, and prevent people from having a say over what goes into their food. US clean air laws and endangered species laws have already been overturned by international trade agreements, and now Mexico and the Bush administration are going after tractor trailer safety standards. If that doesn't seem crazy enough, consider this: the state of California is being sued under NAFTA for $900 million by a Canadian company for banning a cancer causing gasoline additive that was getting into their drinking water. Under NAFTA, as with most trade agreements, the case will be settled by a faceless dispute resolution body in a foreign country that has no accountability to the public, and conducts its operations in secret.

There is one big thing we can do right now. George W. Bush is trying to push legislation through Congress to give him the power to negotiate these agreements without any input or review from the Congress. Fast Track negotiating authority lets the president negotiate the FTAA and other trade agreements in secret, and then send it to Congress, which has 60 days to vote it up or down with no ammendmnets. 60 days is a very short period of time to sift through the details of thousands of pages of a trade agreement. The Congress has 100 legislative days (which translates into 4 or 5 months) to review executive orders that are generally much shorter and less complicated than trade agreements. Fast track is just plain wrong.

This is going to be a tight vote that will be won or lost in the House of Representatives, so any and all calls and letters to your Congressperson make a difference. You can look up who your congress person is at http://www.house.gov/writerep/

You can find more info on fast track at the followign sites:

• Sierra Club Responsible Trade Campaign
• Public Citizen Global Trade Watch
• AFLCIO Make the global economy work for families page

okay, your reading off the same script.

i have nothing left to say to your points except for the link that you sent me gave me a nice selection of hotjobs.com, monster, and the ilk. i can see you don't even research your links before you post them. Given that, here's some information.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations Library homepage
National Statistical Coordinization Board - Yearbook of Labor Statistics page (needs to be ordered)
Duke University Library's Indexes and Databases for Researching Labor Unions and Labor History

Biased links:
AFL-CIO homepage
Union Resource Network

Historically, a useful trick for a political movement is to have two arms; the highly visible part that works through the political process, and the extremists who do the dirty work. There are endless examples; the U.S. Revolutionary War, the IRA, the union movement, the U.S. civil rights movement, the green movement, and now the anti-abortion movement. It's a tactic independent of ideology.

If the goon movements are secretly working with the lobbyists, it's a straightforward conspiracy case. But sometimes they really are independent. This is most likely where some strong ideology or religion is involved, one strong enough to motivate people to kill.

This may start a new kind of publicity war. The pro-abortion movement could retaliate by publishing the names and addresses of anti-abortion lobbyists. Unions may start publishing names, addresses, and pictures of CEOs they don't like. (The AFL-CIO already names names). Unclear where this leads. Probably to increased sales of armored cars, which are popular in countries with a strong anti-business faction.

let's take France for example

Yes, let's. It's as good as any to display the fallacy inherent in your claim.

last presidential elections, there were more than a dozen parties running, ranging from comunists, socialists, greens, republicans...all the way to extreme right wing party...those are just a few of the most important ones

For what appears to be a complete enumeration of French political parties please see this wonderful list.

so you see, to someone used to seeing a great variety of political parties, the choice between republicans and democrats is really irrelevant, since they will pretty much do the same thing with just a few minor differences.

Now we get to the heart of the fallacy. You conclude that since we only use two names for our parties that we only have two factions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our political process is actually at least as diverse as any other industrialized nation and probably more so.

The two parties are both so fractured into warring factions that an election doesn't pass without some pithy political pundit publically pondering the possibility that the Log Cabin Republicans will finally force the Christian Coalition to disperse itself into a new political entity. And while it's difficult to find public discussion of the infighting among the Democratic factions one simply needs to compare the agenda of the AFL-CIO, with it's heavy focus on keeping high-polluting manufacturing jobs domestic, and the Sierra Club's focus on the environment above all else to see that the party is as fundamentally fractured as the GOP.

The net result is that our government is effectively run by a coalition of factions, just as in other western nations. While we don't explicitly name the factions, no one doubts that they exist. John McCain's agenda was markedly different from George Bush's which is markedly different from Pat Robertson's. Al Gore and Bill Bradley were representing completely different interests and constituencies than Jesse Jackson.

See past the simplistic media presentation to what's really there.

daniel

If you feel like your employer is exploiting you, then you might want to consider forming a union at your workplace. Even if you feel that you're paid sufficiently well, if you're subjected to unreasonable conditions and talking with management isn't fixing things, you may want to get someone to do the talking for you.
--

flash forward about 10 years or so, i am now the CTO of an internet startup, getting paid way more than i "deserve" by my old scale, and yet all i do is, sit on the phone, talk to the people that work for me, talk to the people i work for, and think... and for me, there is no difference between home and work. i understand now what my father told me so many years ago...

And, to clarify, how does that justify your inflated paycheck? I can understand it justifying your inflamed ulcer, but why does the fact that you've sold your soul for the almighty dollar mean that you should make more than others, who actually *do the work*?

By the way, my father's in construction (and non-union, unfortunately), and trust me, his work does *NOT* stay separate from the rest of his life. He recieves faxes and pages at 10:30pm, and has to review plans and price quotes during dinnertime. And furthermore, he has chronic back problems to deal with, along with strong classist attitudes from the people he works for.

I'm a database programmer, and I've lucked out with my current job, but I've had a few previous jobs, and trust me, there was no separation. I was once paged at 11:30pm at night so I could fix a simple little bug. I'm sure that's happened to a lot of people on Slashdot.

Don't feel as though you're justified in recieving an insane amount of money while people who are living paycheck to paycheck are actually *producing* something. Chances are, if all the managers and CEO's called in sick tomorrow (contrary to Ayn Rand), the world would not grind to a halt, but instead function more efficiently and freely than ever before.

In a way, I apologize for being a bit harsh, but I'm sick and tired of people who make 419 times the average wage of their workers trying to justify that gap. I refuse to believe that there is any justification, whatsoever, not when there's hunger in the world, and more imporantly, when Tim Berners-Lee drives a beat up Volkswagen.

It just doesn't make any sense.

Michael Chisari

We have only had this "free-trade" crap for twenty years or so, before that everything was heavily regulated, lots of tarrifs. All of our real economic growths and prosperity (for everyone) occured before this free-trade crap became a religion. Now, its all about profits (to stock-holders) and a huge increase in income-disparity (less than 1% of americans have 40% of the assets in this country). For the last 20 years, real ecnomic progress has stopped, real (time/interst adjusted) wages have fallen.

www.paywatch.org