[AT] Re: Union Labor

[Dan Glass]

Walmart has done alot for this country and its people. I don't know any 
disgruntled Walmart employees (I am sure there are some within 100's of 
thousands of employees. )  If you ask them if they would rather have $40 
per hour instead of $12, I am sure almost all would say yes.  But if you 
ask a customer if they had rather pay $40 for the product they are now 
buying for $19.95,  that's quite a different story.  And the customers 
number in the millions. The truth is that Labor Unions cost us all. They 
are like shoplifters or people who defraud insurance companies. We end 
up paying in the end. When I see a union label, I usually don't buy the 
product.  I think it means it is made with inferior raw materials to pay 
too much wages for unskilled labor. There are exceptions, but not many.  
I buy American, but not much Union.

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>Well, the union provides a united front to bargain for better wages and 
>benefits, including a safer workplace and rudimentary health and pension 
>benefits.   This is actually a social good, as the taxpayers end up 
>subsidizing corporate free-loaders like WalMart whose employees are so 
>poorly compensated they sooner or later end up on the dole for their health 
>care and pensions.   Without unions, the extremes of wealth and penury in 
>America would be even more pronounced.
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>Yes, many unions are corrupt; they are nothing more than a mirror of modern 
>American society as a whole.  What can one do?   Destroy the corruption and 
>you will destroy the system.   Corruption holds the system together.  Not 
>articulated goals.   Not shared values.   But a corruption that pervades 
>virtually every relationship in modern America, and which "holds" the 
>country "together" rather like rotted vines holding together a rotted house.
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>Now you can scream and holler and wave the flag all you want, but that is 
>the essential, salient feature of our modern society.   It will last until a 
>new economic dispensation (the source, finally, of *all* values) is 
>sufficiently in place to produce new values that hopefully will mirror the 
>best that is in each of us, both as a nation and as part of a larger world 
>community.
>
>Louis Godena (getting back to tractors, hopefully)
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