You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Minimum Wage
I have no idea about the steel mills, but if you don't have unions, employers will take advantage of employees, like for example, fast food franchises they pay as little as they can, and I bet you their profits are huge, hell you don't even know what they are selling as food.
or the rail roads, or the automobile industry, or the teacher unions, or ....etc.
ever notice that progress is pretty much limited to non union industries?
taking advantage of the employees isn't going to be a problem much longer. Sit your mind at ease and say hi to the robot that takes your job.
Oddly enough some people seem to think that the purpose of a business is to provide jobs.
nope.
Ok, let's see I can only really speak for Honduras the US experience might be different I have only read about it so my opinion is practically worthless as you have to live something to have a practical say in it. Ok, here we had some strong unions, bananas, mining, utilities (all utilities were government owned) teachers etc. So after 1990 when the government which was of the more right wing party as all we had were two parties one center right the other extreme right, well the extreme right won in 1990 and started implementing Milton Friedman's ideas (most of the top government figures were egressed from the Chicago School of economics) anyway they started weakening the unions, the standard explanation was union workers who at that time were a large part of the middle class were actually extorting business and these poor businessmen had to work with losses. So the unions started losing power, workers started getting less benefits, some governemnt depndencies (airports, ports were privatized and others like telecommunications and energy were semi privatized) whta happened, the workers, including teachers stopped being middle class they became poor, and astoundingly all the businesses and government companies that were going broke, didn't become solvent all of them still say they are on the verge of bankruptcy. Because you see the unions weren't really the problem (I agree most unio leaders are crooks) the problem is corruption at all levels, government employees want to and do steal as much as they can, companies pretend they are going to close so they won't be taxed, so what we ended up with is 1.5 million immigrant workers the majority of whom are in the US most of them undocumented, and more millionaires than this coutry could possibly have, thanks to corruption and drug trafficking. Do you know, we have a lot of millionaires some of whom owe up to 100 million USD in utility bills abd they are not charged? But if I go a month without paying the I get the service cut off.
As to the robot who takes my job he's going to have a great time because I have no job.
In the US we work all of our adult lives in order to be able to survive with 'no job' when we retire.
and yet..
lookit you.
what's your secret?
No secret, I'm 56 I can still do an odd job every now and then, I am not lazy, I can speak English, even though that is not such a great advantage in Honduras a lot of people can speak English, but I do know a lot of people and sometimes I get the chance to do something in which I can earn some money. We do have social security it doesn't kick in for me until I'm 65 and it's a very small amount at the most a person can get about 200 dollars, so it doesn't cover that much but of course it is better than nothing. I would think you have social security, I don't know how good it is for you, but I have met a lot of North Americans who came down here to retire as their SS wasn't enough to live on in the US and they found they could live much better here. Of course this was before we got the crime wave we are in right now.