Labor
For the past decade, I have always tried to provide living wages with good benefits for my employees. In 1995, the entry-level wage at XMission was $7/hr with dental, medical, and 401K benefits. Today it is $11/hr. However, I have been fortunate to have had a robust business that can pay its employees well. Many other startups and small businesses can not and I think it is bad for the economy to have government force these businesses into situations they can not sustain. On the other hand, there are many large, enormously profitable businesses that shovel care of their employees onto the taxpayer. I believe this latter situation does need more regulation.
What is the labor union role in this? I welcome your input as I do not have a deep understanding of the issues that face labor unions today. I look at outsourcing, trade agreements, and illegal immigration policy as it stands today and do not understand why the labor unions did not have more control over these problems when congress allowed them to begin.
Even from the workers perspective, it is easy to argue in favor of outsourcing, trade agreements, and "illegal immigration". We are one people occupying one planet. Huge and growing disparities in living standards between us and the inhabitants of the third world inject instability into the system that could very well cause us harm far greater than benefits to be gained by taking a more protectionist approach to our ecomnomy. Spreading the wealth around is necessary, as long as we make sure that it doesn't all end up in the hands of the small group at the top.
The blood shed by the early union members bought us redistribution of wealth, by forcing the acknowledgement that money can subjugate workers, but that any enlightened society cannot and will not let that happen. It was a form of "democracy in action", because money owns the true political machinery, but working people are far to numerous to lose any decision made on the basis of true majority rule. This is a lesson that still needs to be widely understood and taught.
The role of labor falls to the same people who, to a great extent, make up the category of people called consumers. Given that workers fill both critical roles, it is easy to see that we are short sighted if we ever let the big money folks convince us that the magic in capitalism comes only from capital. Our society should work on constructing new means for workers to meet collectively in influencing company decision making, becuase labor, collectively, is such a major stakeholder. If done intellegently, labor unions probably could even be convinced to accept the concept of "company unions". Companies need to have managerial flexibility, and traditional unions have nearly become an anachronism, but it is not clear to me that management can or should have 100% of the voice in deciding what "Teamwork" will look like. Formalizing things in this area seems like it could be an important next step on the journey to the future.
