From the comments of the Strib’s guest Labor Day op-ed.

All Japanese inports are assembled by NON-UNION workers

What does that tell you about quality and workmanship? GM missed the chance to jettison the unions and they were saved by Obama because they contributed 50 million to his campaign. You wouldn’t need cash for clunkers because GM cars would cost that much less without the scum-bag unions.

posted by lvonlehe on Sep. 6, 09 at 8:29 PM

Japanese workers

work in Japan, for Japanese bosses. Maybe lvonlehe should move to Japan. But wait — Japanese culture doesn’t like “the nail that sticks up” so maybe that wouldn’t work out so well.

I spent the ’70s working at the Des Moines Firestone plant. Yes, we had quality problems. We had problems because management would not listen to labor and kept saying build faster, while we kept telling them that radial tires had to be built slower. Management forced us to build tires that blew out on the road, and all but destroyed the Firestone brand. Japanese management would have listened, and did.

Without unions working people wouldn’t have enough income to buy much, and that’s a problem. The decline of unions has meant a decline of choice. Instead of locally owned stores, we have chains that underpay their employees.

The decline of unions has meant that there’s been no one to stop the rich from getting richer — not because they’ve worked harder, but because they keep seizing a bigger slice of the pie. (Remember how they kept telling us they were growing the pie? That was before all their phony bubbles crashed.) Unions gave us the forty hour week, paid holidays, and, once upon a time, healthcare benefits.

No unions have given us stagnant wages, fewer benefits, and a preening overclass that believes a man behind a desk is worth 400 times more than the workers who actually design, make and distribute the products.

posted by MarkGisleson on Sep. 7, 09 at 8:16 AM

Damn but that reads better with paragraph breaks (the Strib’s comments don’t allow them).

I would, btw, like to thank the Strib for farming out their Labor Day editorial. I doubt they have any editorial writers left who could sincerely praise union workers.

But that beats the PiPress which has a Labor Day story, but no editorial. Not unless you count their pro-Chamber of Commerce editorial from last Wednesday. (Their editorial staff must have taken his vacation this week.)

Opinuendo talks about the Fair, apples, lawn ornaments, devices to let women pee standing up and the start of public schools. That last item touches on Labor Day weekend and the start of school this week instead of last week, something they blame on the teacher’s unions and tourism lobby. I think the Minnesota tourism lobby deserves all the credit on that one, and Opinuendo deserves a fat lip for trash talking a union going into Labor Day weekend.

The NYTimes is even worse. “Labor Day” only appears at the bottom of their online front page, under Recent Blog Posts. That link takes you to a post about words. The Times does have an editorial that mentions Labor Day — as the holiday marker that signals the beginning of fall.

The overclass has grown a bit too insulated, too caught up in their own problems stemming from popped bubbles. The usual condescending editorials are gone, and all that’s left is a grubby obsession with self and quality of life issues for the haves.

Better pickings at the overly opinionated Washington Post:

Editorial: Facing the specter of growing inequality (growing? what’s left for the overclass to take? our organs?)

Harold Meyerson: Unhappy Labor Day

Alec MacGillis on the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka

E.J. Dionne on the Roberts Court’s opportunity to strengthen corporations

What Washingtonians make

Some excerpts from Robert J. Samuelson’s Bad Future for Jobs?

– Since the recession’s start in December 2007, the number of lost payroll jobs totals 6.9 million. A third of today’s jobless have been unemployed more than six months, almost double the share a year ago and a post-World War II high.

– The unemployment and “underemployment” rate is 16.8 percent — this includes the officially unemployed plus all part-time workers who’d prefer full-time jobs, as well as discouraged and demoralized job-seekers who have stopped looking for work.

The future of jobs? The future of jobs ain’t shit. All we’re manufacturing in this country is a bigger underclass. An underclass that’s undereducated, misinformed and driven by fears and prejudices. Corporate values have turned our working class into an Appalachian archipelago in which the chumps work while the smarter “trash” learn to get by without working.

Think to the future. Why work when you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of our culture with an iPod and some sort of advanced Kindle? How much worse is a homeless shelter than the kind of housing you can afford if you work for minimum wage? Is a long wait at the Emergency Room worse than a longer wait while your insurance company figures out how to deny your claim?

When you devalue work, why would anyone want a job? The road we’re on is one that ends with work camps, stepped up vagrancy laws, and a microscopic middle class squeezed between the vast underclass and a grossly overprivileged upper class.

All enabled by a punditariat that has forgotten 20 years of Reagan-Bush-BushCheney, and that will blame Obama-Biden for every woe that has befallen us all because we tried it their way. And their way worked. For them.

Enough is enough. There are obvious solutions if our leaders were bold enough to enact them.

Universal single payer healthcare. This would accomplish two things:

it would fix our healthcare problem

it would gut the bloated insurance industry creating massive unemployment among white collar workers, precipitating the urgent need for serious jobs creation and a reinvestment in education

Nationalize our banks and strip non-banks of all power to issue financial instruments. There can be no economic justice so long as money handlers get to skim off the top. The Bible got this one right, and anyone who prefers the current system is spitting on the Torah, Bible and Quran.

Institute a maximum wage. Make it flexible, but put an end to disproportionate compensation. If your CEO is so friggin’ brilliant, make him/her a part owner.

Cap wealth. How much of our current greed is driven by A types who must have more than everyone else?

Worker ownership. Hate unions? Make workers owners and you’ll see unprecedented cooperation between management and labor. The primary purpose of business should be to provide goods and services to customers, and decent jobs to all their employees.

A contiguous metropolitan areas act. Our problems with schools, law enforcement and public services would be diminished considerably if metropolitan areas had to deal with all their problems instead of the current mess made by drawing arbitrary lines that puts wealth on one side, and the need for services on the other. This is one country, indivisible and united. Or at least it should be.

Eliminate all corporate taxes and then tax capital gains as income. Abolish taxes for anyone making less than the official poverty rate, and slash tax rates for the lower income brackets. If there were no corporate taxes, shareholders would be ruthless in stomping out the “perks,” all of which are subsidized by a screwy tax system. And if this was done properly, there’d be no need to institute a maximum wage law.

Amend the Constitution to make the U.S. Senate based on population. Smaller states should share a Senator while California and New York should have at least half a dozen. This isn’t about politics, it’s about a design flaw that has kept Congress from addressing our real problems.

Unions are needed only so long as we fail to improve our system. Without system improvements, unions are needed as a failsafe against the tyranny of wealth. Want to kill unions? Make the system work for everyone, not just some of us.

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Didn’t mean to rant, but somehow that always ends up happening on Labor Day.