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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (336)	9/1/2011 12:59:53 PM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

That is the short term view. Wait until you have a country that is like China. Full disclosure if you will. Are you a business owner or related to someone who is?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (336)	9/1/2011 1:19:14 PM
From: cnyndwllr	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

Jorj, first, thanks for the Obama quote on affirmative action. I had not read that. Second, you must live in a very cuddly world for you to write: "companies who treat their employees better than how their competition treats their employees will attract the better employees and therefore will have a competitive advantage. Happy employees are more productive. The fact is that unions have a vested interest in keeping the relationship between businesses and workers as contentious as possible. In reality, it isn't in either the business's or worker's best interest to have anything but good will between each other." We can speculate on this all we want and arrive at differing conclusions based on our views of human nature, but we don't have to because we have this thing called history. In this country every time management had the upper hand and unions were emasculated and powerless wages dropped, working conditions deteriorated and the average working man suffered. When unions were stronger or the threat of unionization was present, the working man benefited. It seems that "companies" are less concerned with "happy employees" than they are with happy dollars. Since there is only one pie to split and the profits of that pie must be divided between labor, management and ownership, those who wield the most power take most of the pie. Without unions each employee has virtually no power and gets little. This is especially true for the majority of the work force who are fungible with ready to work, unemployed and eager replacements cued up and waiting for jobs. It is less true for hard to find skilled and talented workers but with unemployment running at probably 15% in real terms now and very few instances of societal full employment, your scenario would create an even greater unbalance between the wealth and incomes of workers and those who are in upper management or own the companies. You should know that. Back in the days when others had such happy thoughts as yours they speculated that as mechanization required less labor that workers would work less hours and make more money. It turns out that as mechanization required less labor companies laid off workers, paid them less and took more profits into management and ownership. The average working man is more productive now than in the 60s BUT he makes about 3/4 of the wages he made back then in real dollars. Trust history. So much for happy thoughts about benevolent employers wanting happy employees. Ed