Slashdot Mirror

Wage disparity has grown

Probably true, and completely irrelevant. Why should I care whether Bill Gates makes $100 million or $200 million? If an economic metric can be improved by simply destroying someone's wealth or income, that metric sucks. Envy is a poor basis for policy.

average wages have declined, especially when benefits are all but disappearing.

Here's a report from the left-leaning EPI. They toss a lot of numbers around and have some screwy math (somehow a 0.1% median change for men and -0.2% change for women combines to a -1.1 median change for everyone?), and the worst they can come up with is that median compensation has been stagnant from 2003-2007, after growing from 2000-2003. If true that's not great, but it's a far cry from the doom and gloom that the left has been continuously preaching. It also fails to account for continued technological progress making things common today that were luxuries or completely unavailable 10 or 20 years ago. (Exhibit A: the Internet).

A more accurate comparison to the United States would be Britain, where protectionism, social medicine, and things like the "token" tax on stock trades have resulted in a much more equitable society.

The UK doesn't seem to do too well compared to the US here. Or is it good if everyone loses wealth, as long as the rich lose the most? At that point envy turns into spite.

> First, regarding the Employee Free Choice Act, there is a lot of
> misinformation about this that is being unchallenged by the mainstream media. One
> myth is that this act will eliminate the secret ballot for union organizing.
> That is NOT true. The employees will still be able to request that a
> secret ballot election be held. It will eliminate the employer's right to
> demand a secret ballot for the purpose of delaying union certification,
> and in the interim, intimidate employees to reject the union.

Intimidate employees concerning their votes ... in a secret ballot? That makes no sense at all. While it might be a delaying tactic, it's not a union-busting one either, simply because the delay it buys will be less than a month, as a rule. If unions really are about fairness (by someone's definition of equal power) then giving the company the right to demand the same ballot seems like a very harmless idea. At worst, the employees turn out not to want a union when they get a secret ballot. Would you then force one on them? Kind of seems antithetical to the ideal of empowered workers.

[snip bits dismissing anecdotal evidence]

Sure, let's keep this analytical.

> Fair analysis of data (e.g. http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/datazone_rtw_index)
> indicates that unions have a positive impact upon the distribution
> of wealth, and general level of prosperity. Moreover, as unions decline
> in influence nationally, living standards decline both in the unionized and
> non-unionized sectors. Median real wages among those of you who live in
> so-called "right to work" states are lower than for those who live in
> states that don't interfere in the membership requirement that is written into
> union contracts. Yes, I'm sure that you may have read some report
> from the Heritage Foundation, or Cato Institute that said otherwise. But
> if you believe those sources of information, you may as well watch Fox
> news. If you must rely so heavily on anecdotes, talk to older members of your
> family, and ask them about whether or not there was ever such a thing
> as a "stay-at-home" mom. Ask them how could anyone afford to live that way.

The living standard of the USA has increased dramatically and largely monotonically since the peak of union activity. The rise in the tech field (dotbombs notwithstanding) is substantially linked with this, and the tech field is largely nonunionised. The right-to-work states (as opposed to at-will-employment states, which are different) started out lower in most cases, because they were mostly in places like the poorer South. A large example would be Florida, which was never a very prosperous state. Their actual wealth growth has been fairly good. You're also completely ignoring the influence of different industries being located in different states. As for your ad hominem attacks on Heritage/Cato, feel free to actually debunk their reports, as opposed to lumping them with an entertainment company that doesn't make a business of research. Thank you. If unbiased analysis is what interests you, I admit that your reference to epi.org hardly helps your case.

[snip anecdotal evidence about the good ol' days]

We are keeping this analytical right? So unions condoning, defending and promoting felonies to my personal knowledge isn't relevant either?
Good. Then neither is your happy childhood and where daddy got his pay.

> The largest contributing factor to the difference in prevailing living
> standards, and distribution of wealth, between now and then, is the
> influence of organized labor. In the late 1960's nearly 33% of the workforce
> in the U.S. was represented by unions. Adjusting for inflation to
> today's dollars, in 1968 minimum wage was nearly $10/hour. Now the portion
> of the workforce represented is a dismal 8%

As you can see from my four-digit ID, I've been hanging out on Slashdot for a long time. Whenever the union issue comes up here, I notice that there are an awful lot of negative comments against unions, more than there are favoring them. Since I'm firmly on the pro-union side, it's incumbent on me to chime in.
First, regarding the Employee Free Choice Act, there is a lot of misinformation about this that is being unchallenged by the mainstream media. One myth is that this act will eliminate the secret ballot for union organizing. That is NOT true. The employees will still be able to request that a secret ballot election be held. It will eliminate the employer's right to demand a secret ballot for the purpose of delaying union certification, and in the interim, intimidate employees to reject the union.
Now regarding the attitude generally displayed here toward organized labor, anecdotes prove nothing. Tired old tales about your uncle's friend's co-worker who showed up to work drunk, and caused your uncle's friend to lose his thumb, but couldn't be fired because of his union, may convince lots of people that unions are a bad thing, but they are largely apocryphal. Even where they are true in isolated cases, it is an indicator of incompetent management, not a necessary impact of the union. If you are managing a unionized work-force, and you are too lazy to even read their contract (which would tell you how to dismiss such an employee), then you are the problem, not the union.
Fair analysis of data (e.g. http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/datazone_rtw_index) indicates that unions have a positive impact upon the distribution of wealth, and general level of prosperity. Moreover, as unions decline in influence nationally, living standards decline both in the unionized and non-unionized sectors. Median real wages among those of you who live in so-called "right to work" states are lower than for those who live in states that don't interfere in the membership requirement that is written into union contracts. Yes, I'm sure that you may have read some report from the Heritage Foundation, or Cato Institute that said otherwise. But if you believe those sources of information, you may as well watch Fox news. If you must rely so heavily on anecdotes, talk to older members of your family, and ask them about whether or not there was ever such a thing as a "stay-at-home" mom. Ask them how could anyone afford to live that way.
I was raised in the '60s and '70s. When I was a kid, my father went to work in a factory every weekday. My mother did not work outside the home. This was typical among most of the families that I knew. Forty man-hours a week, for a family of four (six in our case), performed by a man without a college education, (in fact my dad didn't even have a high school diploma), was sufficient to maintain middle class living standards in typical American families at that time. We had health insurance, owned our homes, had leisure time, vacations, and typically, a full time mother. When my dad's company laid off workers temporarily during a lull, my father's seniority was honored. He felt bad for dismissed coworkers, but he didn't cut back spending, or miss any house payments. My father retired with a pension that kept him from falling into abject poverty for the rest of his days. That pension was bargained for by his union. It was not provided by his employer out of the goodness of their hearts.
As for myself, as a young man, I joined a trade union, served an apprenticeship and became a journeyman. But recognizing the direction of the political viability of unions, I decided to go to college part time later in life, and become an engineer. I paid my own way, and graduated nine years ago without the debt of a college loan. That was one of the benefits of a union wage. Today, though, working as a college educated professional, I barely approach the living standards that my family had in my childhood.

OK now you are starting to make me mad you lying bullshit artist:

"Canadian health care in comparison

The Canadian health care system is often compared to the US system. The US system spends the most in the world per capita, and was ranked 37th in the world by the World Health Organization in 2000, while Canada's health system was ranked 30th. The WHO ranking has been criticized by some for its choice of ranking criteria and statistical methods, and the WHO is currently revising its methodology and withholding new rankings until the issues are addressed.[49][50] Canada spent approximately 9.8% of GDP on health care in 2005, almost one percentage point higher than the average of 9.0% in OECD countries.[29] According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, spending is expected to reach $160 billion, or 10.6% of GDP, in 2007.[51] This translates to $4,867 per person. Most health statistics in Canada are at or above the G8 average.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada#Canadian_health_care_in_comparison

See also:

"As the chart below reveals, the cost gap between the United States and Canada has only widened since 1993, and per capita health care expenditures in the United States are now almost double those in Canada ($6,401 vs. $3,359). Canada's per capita health expenditures rose about 65% from 1993 to 2005, while costs in the United States rose by over 90%. Yet infant mortality in the United States is higher and life expectancy at birth is less than in Canada. It is also noteworthy that despite Canada's much lower expenditures on health care, Canadians consult with physicians far more often than do Americans. The average number of physician consultations per capita was 6.0 in Canada, versus 3.8 in the United States.1"

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20071205

Here is a bit of history that is pretty interesting. The odd part of it is that at one time, those coming to the US legally with the 'branchero' program were not permitted to leave the US and go home without their employer's ok.

http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/17.html

I have not found any evidence of wage depression happening with big influxes of the illegals, but that doesn't mean it isn't so. Do you have any graph of wages over time? Closest I could find is
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage.
Even if it does depress the wages, it does keep costs down, increasing the purchasing power of those depressed wages.

The self replicating robots that could do anything was spoofed by Al Capp : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo
Anyway, the self replecating robots that are general purpose laborers are called humans now.

Check this out:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621

CEO's make 262 times what a worker makes, up from 24 times in 1966. Where's the money going? Not into plant and equipment. Check this guy out:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/05/news/companies/ford_execpay/

I wish I could make that sort of money for destroying a company.

Why shouldn't the workers get a piece of the pie too? After all, isn't that the American dream?

BTW, who decides what cars to build? Who decides how to market them? Who decided to stick with SUVs for far too long? Who decided to kill the electric car? Who fought off increasing CAFE standards? Management.

I'm not saying Unions were innocent little angels, but blaming them for everything is wrong. Personally I feel that far too long we have a had a confrontational relationship between management and labor. They both need to realize they need each other and that they both have the same goal: to make money.

All those reports that complain about IT job losses since 2001 are reflecting the dot-com implosion. I know hundreds of IT workers laid off during that time, none were laid off because of outsourcing, they were all laid off because of bad business decisions in a time of easy of capital.

Most IT folks I know have been re-employed since 2001. Currently across all unemployed, long-term unemployment is only 8% of unemployed.

I find it difficult to believe that there are currently 656,000 unemployed IT workers in the U.S - there are only 1.4 million unemployed Management, professional, and related occupations. I would not be surprised that short-term unemployment of IT workers is higher than others because of the rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I doubt they represent half of all office workers unemployed.

As of 2003, only 3% and the short-term unemployed and 4.2% of the long-term unemployed were in the Information sector.

At the same time, I know several recent Indian immigrants who started a company which created many new IT jobs in the US.

I agree that H1-B is silly. Anyone with a college education should be allowed to immigrate to the US and become citizens. They should come to the US where they can make use of our state of high economic freedom to generate wealth for all.

Yes, but there are ways for 3rd-world countries to boost their economy without being export-centric. They simply all copied the Japan approach like lemmings.

Excuse me but it's not like many Third World Nations wanted to copy the Japanese. The Washington Consensus pushed countries into promoting export as a big part of their economy. Not only that but the Washington Consensus pressured nations to encourage their small farmers to move into cities and let large agricultural operations do the farming. Well, when they did their agricultural productivity went down. And massive First World farm subsidies keep it down as the farmers who are still farming n the Third World can't compeat with farmers who receive massive subsidies.

> orthodox MACROeconomics suggests that wages are sticky downwards -- i.e. they don't tend to fall based on an increase of supply...

This seems incredibly doubtful. I could believe it, if you're just talking about gross wages, but that's almost meaningless. Real wages, indexed against inflation, effectively decrease whenever gross wages aren't going up.

And negotiating a salary increase is very difficult in a slack labor market. This is pretty fundamental economic theory, not to mention something that can many people have actually experienced.

This is the situation we are increasingly finding ourselves in: gross wages haven't decreased, but in many sectors real wages have shrunk. If inflation increases, as it seems poised to do, this may get worse. And having a labor surplus will only exacerbate the situation.

The only positive effect I can envision of such a surplus is that it might act as a brake on inflation, by preventing workers from negotiating salary increases as they might in a tight market, thus preventing a positive-feedback loop. However, I'm not sure whether having the surplus will be beneficial in the net or not, especially when you consider the huge costs associated with maintaining a large number of non-productive workers (unemployment, welfare, retraining, etc.).

Also, labor surpluses have a history of causing political and social volatility. It strikes me as odd that we're intentionally creating one in the U.S., since I doubt it's something that most voters would support if asked.

Yeah, part time. Let's see, 7:30 AM to 3:00 PM, then extra-curricular duties, lesson planning, grading papers, and taking the continuing education courses required of them at their own expense. Yeah, any job that takes only 70 hours a week out of 168 is definitely part-time. Then, of course, there's the three months of the year the kids are out. Only one and a half to two and a half months of which are, for teachers, typically taken up by meetings, room setup, conferences, and often teaching summer school. So they really only work that 70 hours about 45 weeks a year after you figure in breaks during the school year. Nobody else gets vacation, personal days, holidays, and sick days of course.

Then of course there's the fact that it's wonderful to deal with disrespectful pukes in the classroom, parents who think the school should favor their kids over order and education, crony school boards selected from the parents of the students with little or no training in education as bosses, and administrations willing to sacrifice any teacher's career to keep the district from getting a bogus lawsuit filed against it.

Hell, for $45k that's cake!

</sarcasm>

Jay P. Greene's little yellow article only accounts for time spent in the classroom. Who the fuck do you think does all the work for a teacher outside the classroom? Nine months at seven hours a day is only the time the teacher spends instructing the kids. Do you really think they just show up and wing the whole thing? He also has a nice little blurb about retirement benefits being so nice. Hell, I interviewed for a teaching position, and I'm sure I'd have plenty of retirement money saved after 40 years or so considering the district requires the teachers to place 11% of their pay directly into the fund. Where he sees over $30 an hour someone who knows any teachers personally can easily see about $14-$17 an hour, which is quite competitive with managing a shift at McDonald's but not so much with the nuclear engineers he's talking about. Oh, and since when does it take a Master's to fight fires? Most school districts require one or a set amount of work towards one of beginning teachers or require one within a few years of starting.

The nationwide average starting pay for a teacher with a Bachelor's degree is about $31k, BTW, if you can find a district that accepts a Bachelor's without at least 12 additional credit hours.

For a little more realistic picture, try on for size any one of these pages. This blog post at Education and Technology is especially nice for the comments.

Oh, and at what point are most programmers, opticians, radiology techs, factory workers, and biologists regularly responsible for the health and safety of 30 minors (whom they often are not allowed to even discipline) at a time?

If you get a serious illness, you may cause the company's insurance premiums to go up. The additional costs add up so companies try to keep "Unhealthy" people off the roles. Further, some companies are "Self-insured" and probably have under-the-table access to your medical records, anyway. Is business in the business of firing sick workers? See this article on lobbying efforts to change the law in the US.

Do you have any data at all to back this up, or are you just spouting what you heard on Fox news?

The Republicans tend to be better for the economy

Let's look at growth. The first chart here shows quarter-over-quarter economic growth since 1992. If you take out a few quarters for each president (recessions happen), Bush and Clinton had fairly comparable growth.

What's the difference? Clinton achieved this growth while simultaneously *eliminating* the deficit he'd inherited from two prior Republican presidents. Bush achieved this growth through the largest deficits in the history of the world.

Clinton's economic policies set the US up for long-term success while enabling growth. Bush enabled growth through disastrous fiscal policy that will continue to damage the US economy long after he's dragged his incompetent ass into retirement.

The Democrats have too many people eating out of the taxpayer coffers

Let's look at job growth under Bush. This report from the Economic Policy Institute argues that essentially all of the job growth under Bush is due to his massive growth in governments. Get that? If Bush hadn't exploded the size of the US government, there would have been almost no job growth over the last 5 years. And of course, he's borrowing money to pay for it all.

So tell me again that *Democrats* encourage people to feed at the public trough?

Honestly, this sort of uncritical thought is destroying America.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the decline in worker productivity as being solely attributal to a lack of prioritization.

I think this quote from the article hits it on the head:

Even if productivity increases, it's constantly outpaced by those expectations, said Don Grimme of GHR Training Solutions, a workplace training company in Coral Springs, Fla.

I'm beginning to think I'm not alone in thinking that Friedman isn't getting the whole picture.

http://epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_viewpoints_ flat

"This is in addition to an already strong economy, which showed little signs of weaking after Katrina"

Define strong economy?

- U.S. national debt is about to cross the $8 trillion mark

- The U.S. annual current-account deficit (trade deficit, budget deficit, etc) for 2005 was heading towards the $800 billion mark, tack on another $100 billion of deficit spending on Katrina maybe it will hit $900 billion. It was %6.4 of GDP in Q1 probably way worse in Q3 now post Katrina. Note from the chart, how the current-account deficit spiked under Reagan and George W.

- Oil companies are making record profits and I'm sure their results alone are bouying economic numbers though they are sucking the life out of the rest of the economy to get it.

A key point is a "strong economy" doesn't operate with staggering trade deficits or borrow massive amounts of money from other countries.

George W. is creating synthetic prosperity:

- Slash taxes for the wealthy
- Dramatically increase government spending
- Borrow vast amounts of money to make up the difference
- Import vast quantities of cheap Chinese goods which means Americans spend less and get more (only problem is all the money they spend is going to China not to American jobs).

All the borrowed money George W. is pumping in to the economy creates the appearance of growth. If the government pours hundreds of billions in to the economy though defense spending, medicare "reform" spending and drug benefits, incentives to energy companies(while oil companies are making money at record levels), $250 billion plus in the new highway bill to build bridges in Alaska to nowhere and massively increase farm subsidies.

The Bush administration has passed one massive federal spending program after another to artificially pump the economy. The rebuild the Gulf bill will just be the next in line. The return to the Moon and Mars is chump change by comparison. Sure the U.S. can afford $10 billion a year for that, it can't afford the hundreds of billions its squandering elsewhere.

You want to create phenomenal 10% growth in GDP, just borrow $1 trillion dollars and pump it in to a $10 trillion economy through government spending. The problem is the wheels fall off as soon as foreign countries stop buying your debt, the debt servicing kills youm and you are mortgaging the future for easy prosperity today.