MY RECENT COMMENTS ON ECONOMIST'S VIEW

TODAY'S COMMENT ON ECONOMIST'S VIEW

RE: As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For -- Eduardo Porter

We could probably get a pretty good consensus together on how to turn our economy away from financialization and back toward higher end manufacturing a la Germany.

But don't bother until we take back the political and economic high ground a la Germany -- a la rebuilding union density -- to make possible doing it. SIMPLE AS THAT.

DO THAT OR DO NOTHING -- talk and talk as much as you want about everything else, you'll never do anything.
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[snip]
It is unnatural and a pathological condition -- ipso facto -- not to have collective bargaining. This unnatural state is itself a result of missing checks and balances. There are no consequences at all for muscling workers in the American labor market.

Solution (to all this): (simply) make union busting a felony -- necessarily backed by RICO so employers cannot play at union busting for a while after laws are passed to see what they can get away with (thereby building up the "continuing" part of the indictment).

Easiest place to start -- the progressive states: WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, NY, MD.
[snip]
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Manufacturing isn't the be-all and end-all for non-college people (2/3 of workforce!). Anyone ever hear of working for Walmart -- for $20 an hour. Probably push Walmart prices up 4-5% -- but everybody else who buys there will be getting an income shift from higher income people when their union can extract the max (might reduce employment where higher income people shop proportionately more than lower ;-O).

The Wage That Meant Middle Class
By LOUIS UCHITELLE APRIL 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20uchitelle.html?_r=0

No reason Walgreens can't pay what supermarkets used to pay before Walmart (end the two-tier contracts!). No reason Chicago taxi drivers have to make half what they used to make (before Uber) -- no reason not to add one dollar a mile to the meter which is now fifty cents below what it was in 1981 (fifty percent higher per capita income later!); that's a purely government decision if ever there was one, made in a climate where low skill working people are expected to live in peonery to make life a little cheaper for everyone else.*

Where there is no political power there is no political will and will be no way. Rebuild union density first -- don't run with the ball before you catch it -- all this other conversation is putting the cart before the horse.

* After I explained the American labor market to my late brother John he came back with: "Martin Luther King got his people on the up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everybody."

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YESTERDAY'S COMMENT ON ECONOMIST'S VIEW 

Re: The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists - Brad DeLong

" But you have nearly no ability to evaluate what you hear. "

But you can listen to your union leaders if you only had them. They are your advocates (as in an advocacy system) -- and they usually know enough economics to know what to do next.
It's usually all about checks and balances anyway (advocacy economics?).

It is unnatural and a pathological condition -- ipso facto -- not to have collective bargaining. This unnatural state is itself a result of missing checks and balances. There are no consequences at all for muscling workers in the American labor market.

Solution (to all this): (simply) make union busting a felony -- necessarily backed by RICO so employers cannot play at union busting for a while after laws are passed to see what they can get away with (thereby building up the "continuing" part of the indictment).

Easiest place to start -- the progressive states: WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, NY, MD.

More people might listen to economists if economist were pushing this simple solution to most all of our economic and political troubles (think Germany).
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Re: "The end of American meritocracy - FT.com "

Again, not a problem in Germany with 16% college -- but where auto manufacturing workers earn $60 an hour because they are (have themselves trained because they have so much market power) trained and retrained to be more and more productive -- not in Germany which manufactures ten times as many vehicles per person as the US and sells nine of them abroad.

Meanwhile Boeing is building its 787 Dreamliner wings and fuselage in Italy and Japan. A German level-unionized economy would never allow that to happen here.

Crazy problem: the US has an enormous immigrant population (have 5 Irish grandparents counting my mother's stepmother myself) which is to naturally willing to work for less. Throw that into our labor market malestorm and minimum wage jobs have been effectively outsourced to Mexico and India and my old taxi job (28 years in NYC, Chi, SF) has been outsourced all over the world.

Meantime, back at American born worker homes 100,000 out of (my guesstimate) 200,000 Chicago gang age males are in street gangs because they wont work for SECOND-WORLD WAGES. Chicago has 60% minority population (40% white, 40% black, 20% Hispanic). That makes for 30% of gang age Chicago males stuck at the bottom. Saw the statement that half of Chicago black males are out of work the other day (I think in Crain's Chicago business) -- fits this.

Nothing is being done. Simple solution: rebuild a healthy labor market (and healthy politics) where workers can test to see how much the consumer will pay. Wont put immigrants out of work -- the economy expands to fit new workers -- ask any economist -- oops; that's where we came into this movie.

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