[BREAK] If you needed to give someone a wake-up call on the need for unions, this piece would be a good primer. As most sentient beings could tell you, just because increased productivity leads to increased profits in a company/industry that does NOT mean those who produced the profit will get to share in it. In Realityville, a place the corporate Repugnants would rather isolate and quarantine, report after report shows that the lack of organization amongst the workers causes the profit sharing to get stuck in a bottleneck somewhere below the corporate execs and the shareholders. This forces the Execs to grab some of the productivity cash and grant the rest to the stockholders. Since the Reagan years, and accelerating with the Bush administration,there have been four distinct, but oh so very connected, stories on the business pages of our newspapers.

• 1) Union membership declines.
• 2) Corporate exec pay rises at record breaking rates. (war profiting CEO's do even better!)
• 3) the "real wage" of the lower and blue collar working classes has dropped.
• 4) Republicans refuse minimum wage hikes..

Meantime, instead of giving appropriate page/TV space to crimes based on the harm to society, white collar criminals get little press while kids dealing pot and the sporadic news of corrupt union officials gets plenty of space/time. So, Jimmy Six-pack/Jane Merlot is often the first to spout off with "Why should I shell out dues money to someone?" Jimmy goes home with less real cash each year, and, although working more hours and producing more each hour he/she works, Jane/Jimmy wonders why he can't afford to live like he did yesterday. And the corporate pirates chuckle at the ease with which they've enlisted Jimmy/Jane in a war of self attrition, while those gaining from the employees labor keep divvying up the huge productivity cash pie! Wouldn't you? ===== [/BREAK] How the World Works - Salon.com Too productive While browsing the World Bank Web site this morning, a headline caught my eye: "Rapid Growth in China, India Are Reducing Extreme Poverty, UN Labor Agency Says." That's odd, I thought, the International Labor Organization doesn't usually specialize in repeating World Bank talking points. As noted here before, the single most common justification given for expanding free trade are the hundreds of millions of people who have escaped extreme poverty in India and China as a result of the integration of those nations into the global economy. But the ILO's attention tends to focus on other matters. I guess executive summaries are all in the eye of the beholder. Here, for example, is the lead sentence of a Shanghai Daily article on the same ILO report referenced by the World Bank, "Eye-popping economic growth and productivity gains in East Asia haven't led to adequate job creation, higher wages or improved working conditions in the region, the International Labor Organization said in a report yesterday." More Here!