Lao Tse
Verified User
There are reasons. Many fast food workers have college degrees and skills. Corporations would rather ship jobs overseas as much as possible to maximize short term profit, the overall economy and society be damned.
More than Half of Fast Food Workers Rely on Welfare
- Thread starter Yoda
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There are reasons. Many fast food workers have college degrees and skills. Corporations would rather ship jobs overseas as much as possible to maximize short term profit, the overall economy and society be damned.
It was pretty clear.
Which fast food chain do you "fell" isn't compensating you adequately, and what gives the federal government the power to address this perceived "injustice"?
I suspect you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Thanks for playing.
Lao Tse
Verified User
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/05/311831/american-middle-class-organized-labor/
Today is Labor Day, a federally recognized holiday that most Americans likely think of as a well-deserved day off. Labor Day was first celebrated in the late 1880′s as labor activists from the American Federation of Labor (which later formed part of the basis for the AFL-CIO) and other unions rallied around a day to celebrate organized labor and to take a day off. In 1887 Oregon started a formal “Labor Day” and by 1897 President Glover Cleveland made it a federal holiday, reacting to pressure from unions following the contentious Pullman Strike.
On this day that is set aside to celebrate the American laborer, Americans should recall the many benefits that organized labor have provided our country:
1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
2. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
3. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
4. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”
And yet, despite the many benefits unions have provided the United States, right-wing politicians and business interests have for years sought to undermine the ability of Americans to organize to demand better pay, benefits, and conditions. From the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act to the recent GOP-led efforts to kill public worker collective bargaining rights, these assaults have successfully decreased union membership over time. In the prosperous 1950′s, nearly one in three Americans was in a union. Today, it is closer to one in ten.
This has had a deterimental effect on the American middle class. As the following chart from CAP’s David Madland and Karla Waters demonstrates, as union membership fell from the 1970′s to the present, the middle class’s share of national income fell as well:
But Americans do not have to allow the assault on unions to succeed and the middle class to decline. As Wisconsin taught the nation, when people come together and organize, they can help beat back the attack on Main Street America. As you enjoy Labor Day today, think about what you can do to help the same labor unions that brought you the weekend, health care coverage, strong wages, and a robust middle class. One great place to start is to help campaigns like We Are Ohio, which is working to repeal the anti-labor law pass by Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) in Ohio.
Like you, for example?
And if your "skills" were in demand, you'd earn more without nanny government forcing your employer to either raise prices or cut your hours, wouldn't you?
Which group do you think Yoda is in?
Here's his uniform cap:
Can't you just hear him asking "fries you want with that?"
"Fries with that you want, hmmm?"
Callinectes
Proud MAGA Semi-Facist
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/1...nscious-salutes-during-purple-heart-ceremony/
You see this guy? He makes about $13 an hour based on a 45 hour work week(which is virtually unheard of in the military). Now ask me if I give a rat's ass about some 45 year old fry guy doing a job I had as a teenager making minimum wage(and damn happy to get it, too). And what are they bitching about? Now they got free health care just like that Ranger in the hospital bed in Afghanistan.
Lao Tse
Verified User
I dont really know anything about that campaign. That article just had it tacked on at the end.
but have you heard of the labor movement in america? Was there any need for it in your opinion?
So I see.
Lao Tse
Verified User
So out of context quotes is all you have. How sad for you and your diminished reasoning capacity.
And many don't give a rats ass about hired killers getting what's coming to them!
Get your dumb asses out of high school jobs, and develop a marketable skill set.
Get your game on jr programer
Lao Tse
Verified User
Allan Brawley
Allan BrawleyProfessor Emeritus of Social Work, Arizona State University
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Reverse the Policies that Are Destroying the Middle Class
Posted: 02/26/2013 5:22 pm
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2008 Fiscal Crisis , Citizens United , Tax Evasion , Deregulation , Nafta , Offshore Tax Havens , Tax Reform , Trade Deficit , Politics News
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In their latest book, The Betrayal of the American Dream, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele present a compelling case that America's middle class is in danger of extinction unless our government reverses course on major policies it has pursued over the last four decades. These include huge tax giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, near catastrophic deregulation of all aspects of our economic system, and free trade practices that have seriously damaged the country.
For decades, Washington and Wall Street have been systematically rewriting the rules of the American economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many - putting in place policies that have steadily dismantled the foundation of America's middle class.
Republicans and Democrats have been complicit in the process of handing over the country - its wealth and its policy-making processes -- to the new ruling class, the ultra-rich. This tiny minority - one percent - has been pouring money into the political process, as well as propaganda mechanisms like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity, in ever greater amounts for no other reason than to promote the policies that benefit it. The 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, in effect, legitimized this unlimited - and anonymous - domination of big money in politics, at the expense of ordinary voters.
Their overwhelming political clout has enabled the largest corporations and the wealthiest individuals to rig the tax system to an astonishing degree, with some managing to pay no taxes at all. While wage and salary earners can pay up to 39 percent in federal taxes, the wealthy typically pay only 15 percent on their income and they are doing their darnedest to have that changed to zero, with the help of John Boehner, Paul Ryan and other Republican operatives. In the meantime, countless multinational corporations have parked billions of dollars overseas in order to avoid paying the taxes they owe.
Sitting in banks in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and other tax-friendly jurisdictions is a staggering amount of money - an estimated $2 trillion, a sum equal to all the money spent by all the states combined every year, or more than half the size of the annual federal budget.
Among the consequences of the ridiculously low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, along with their ability to engage in countless tax avoidance strategies, is to place an unfair share of the tax burden on ordinary working people. It also contributes greatly to the budget deficits and prevents sufficient investment in essential functions, such as restoring our national infrastructure - roads, bridges, airports, schools, etc. - and investing in education and research and development that will keep America competitive globally and create millions of well-paying jobs that cannot be outsourced.
In addition to its decades-long success in rigging the political and tax systems for its own selfish ends, the new ruling class has championed and benefitted enormously from the free trade practices of recent Congresses and Administrations. The American public has been sold a bill of goods about globalization, its supposed long-term benefits, and the negative consequences of protecting jobs at home. It has been a disaster for ordinary working people.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was touted as a means to create countless American jobs producing goods for export to Mexico. Instead, in the twenty years since its passage, it has enabled companies to relocate their manufacturing operations south of the border, costing thousands of American jobs and, incidentally, creating a $698 billion trade deficit with Mexico in 2011.
Barlett and Steele document similar outcomes with our other major trading partners, most notably China, Japan and the European Union. Free trade practices have caused the closing of 14 percent of our country's factories - over 56,000 of them - and cost 5.7 million American workers their jobs in the past ten years alone. Meanwhile, all of our trading partners have taken sensible steps to protect their own workforces from unfair or otherwise harmful competition, while managing to maintain trade surpluses.
While Washington mouths platitudes and gives lip service to trade reform in a never-ending cycle, the trade deficit soars. Thanks to both parties, the cumulative trade deficits since 1976 add up to a staggering $10 trillion. That's trillion with a T, an ocean of red ink that translates into millions of lost jobs.
When blue-collar jobs began to be shipped overseas, we were told that it was an inevitable result of global market forces but assured that the growing service sector would generate enough jobs to replace those lost in manufacturing. However, that has not turned out to be the case. The same free market forces that destroyed our factories and the communities where they were located are at work in the service sector, including information technology and pharmaceuticals. A 2008 study by U. S Department of Labor economists estimated that 160 service occupations that employ thirty million workers - more than 25 percent of that sector - could be off-shored. Clearly, unless current practices change, any job that can be shipped overseas will be.
Closely linked to the free market ideology and equally destructive to American society has been the deregulation mantra - getting the government out of whatever activity will prevent the economic predators from maximizing their power and profit. Deregulation has been catastrophic for American workers, most notably but not only in the airline industry. Employment, job security, wages and benefits have all been drastically reduced, strategic bankruptcies have allowed the biggest airlines to walk away from union contracts and pension obligations, and industry consolidation has reduced competition and increased fares for passengers.
The most damaging consequences of deregulation have, of course, been in the financial industry where Wall Street and the bankers brought the global economy to near collapse in 2008.
Wall Street and the banks have since recovered, thanks largely to huge bailouts from taxpayers, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and capital infusions from the Federal Reserve. But millions of Americans who lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement savings during the collapse did not receive a bailout and will not recover.
Not only did the perpetrators of the 2008 disaster go unpunished, they have been allowed to further enrich themselves and their allies and use their unprecedented wealth to continue to corrupt the democratic process.
Barlett and Steele have been writing about these issues for forty years but have never been so alarmed about what is happening in our country. They are absolutely right in concluding that:
The forces that are dismantling the middle class are relentless. America must stop sacrificing its greatest asset. Because, without a middle class, there isn't really an America.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-brawley/reverse-the-policies-that_b_2762340.html
Allan BrawleyProfessor Emeritus of Social Work, Arizona State University
GET UPDATES FROM ALLAN BRAWLEY
Like
29
Reverse the Policies that Are Destroying the Middle Class
Posted: 02/26/2013 5:22 pm
Read more
2008 Fiscal Crisis , Citizens United , Tax Evasion , Deregulation , Nafta , Offshore Tax Havens , Tax Reform , Trade Deficit , Politics News
SHARE THIS STORY
9
4
4
Submit this story
In their latest book, The Betrayal of the American Dream, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele present a compelling case that America's middle class is in danger of extinction unless our government reverses course on major policies it has pursued over the last four decades. These include huge tax giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, near catastrophic deregulation of all aspects of our economic system, and free trade practices that have seriously damaged the country.
For decades, Washington and Wall Street have been systematically rewriting the rules of the American economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many - putting in place policies that have steadily dismantled the foundation of America's middle class.
Republicans and Democrats have been complicit in the process of handing over the country - its wealth and its policy-making processes -- to the new ruling class, the ultra-rich. This tiny minority - one percent - has been pouring money into the political process, as well as propaganda mechanisms like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity, in ever greater amounts for no other reason than to promote the policies that benefit it. The 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, in effect, legitimized this unlimited - and anonymous - domination of big money in politics, at the expense of ordinary voters.
Their overwhelming political clout has enabled the largest corporations and the wealthiest individuals to rig the tax system to an astonishing degree, with some managing to pay no taxes at all. While wage and salary earners can pay up to 39 percent in federal taxes, the wealthy typically pay only 15 percent on their income and they are doing their darnedest to have that changed to zero, with the help of John Boehner, Paul Ryan and other Republican operatives. In the meantime, countless multinational corporations have parked billions of dollars overseas in order to avoid paying the taxes they owe.
Sitting in banks in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and other tax-friendly jurisdictions is a staggering amount of money - an estimated $2 trillion, a sum equal to all the money spent by all the states combined every year, or more than half the size of the annual federal budget.
Among the consequences of the ridiculously low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, along with their ability to engage in countless tax avoidance strategies, is to place an unfair share of the tax burden on ordinary working people. It also contributes greatly to the budget deficits and prevents sufficient investment in essential functions, such as restoring our national infrastructure - roads, bridges, airports, schools, etc. - and investing in education and research and development that will keep America competitive globally and create millions of well-paying jobs that cannot be outsourced.
In addition to its decades-long success in rigging the political and tax systems for its own selfish ends, the new ruling class has championed and benefitted enormously from the free trade practices of recent Congresses and Administrations. The American public has been sold a bill of goods about globalization, its supposed long-term benefits, and the negative consequences of protecting jobs at home. It has been a disaster for ordinary working people.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was touted as a means to create countless American jobs producing goods for export to Mexico. Instead, in the twenty years since its passage, it has enabled companies to relocate their manufacturing operations south of the border, costing thousands of American jobs and, incidentally, creating a $698 billion trade deficit with Mexico in 2011.
Barlett and Steele document similar outcomes with our other major trading partners, most notably China, Japan and the European Union. Free trade practices have caused the closing of 14 percent of our country's factories - over 56,000 of them - and cost 5.7 million American workers their jobs in the past ten years alone. Meanwhile, all of our trading partners have taken sensible steps to protect their own workforces from unfair or otherwise harmful competition, while managing to maintain trade surpluses.
While Washington mouths platitudes and gives lip service to trade reform in a never-ending cycle, the trade deficit soars. Thanks to both parties, the cumulative trade deficits since 1976 add up to a staggering $10 trillion. That's trillion with a T, an ocean of red ink that translates into millions of lost jobs.
When blue-collar jobs began to be shipped overseas, we were told that it was an inevitable result of global market forces but assured that the growing service sector would generate enough jobs to replace those lost in manufacturing. However, that has not turned out to be the case. The same free market forces that destroyed our factories and the communities where they were located are at work in the service sector, including information technology and pharmaceuticals. A 2008 study by U. S Department of Labor economists estimated that 160 service occupations that employ thirty million workers - more than 25 percent of that sector - could be off-shored. Clearly, unless current practices change, any job that can be shipped overseas will be.
Closely linked to the free market ideology and equally destructive to American society has been the deregulation mantra - getting the government out of whatever activity will prevent the economic predators from maximizing their power and profit. Deregulation has been catastrophic for American workers, most notably but not only in the airline industry. Employment, job security, wages and benefits have all been drastically reduced, strategic bankruptcies have allowed the biggest airlines to walk away from union contracts and pension obligations, and industry consolidation has reduced competition and increased fares for passengers.
The most damaging consequences of deregulation have, of course, been in the financial industry where Wall Street and the bankers brought the global economy to near collapse in 2008.
Wall Street and the banks have since recovered, thanks largely to huge bailouts from taxpayers, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and capital infusions from the Federal Reserve. But millions of Americans who lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement savings during the collapse did not receive a bailout and will not recover.
Not only did the perpetrators of the 2008 disaster go unpunished, they have been allowed to further enrich themselves and their allies and use their unprecedented wealth to continue to corrupt the democratic process.
Barlett and Steele have been writing about these issues for forty years but have never been so alarmed about what is happening in our country. They are absolutely right in concluding that:
The forces that are dismantling the middle class are relentless. America must stop sacrificing its greatest asset. Because, without a middle class, there isn't really an America.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-brawley/reverse-the-policies-that_b_2762340.html
Lao Tse
Verified User
I read it and i do understand it. do you need something explained to you? Its ok to admit you don't get it.
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
actually, we already had a middle class before unions were even imagined......its just that nowdays, liberals use "middle class" as a code word for union members.....
Lao Tse
Verified User
Not really. But keep on revising history to suit your idiocy.