The Glade 4.0

Is there a point to this, or are you trying to be nominated for "Gadfly of the Glade"?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

You aren't going to change your mind so I was going to drop it, since you're going to call names...

Cost of living is cheaper because the standard of living is lower because they get paid slave-wages because they have no unions to raise their wages. Go Google Coca-cola's actions off-shore and tell me there is no correlation between off-shoring labor and the lack of unions in the destination countries.

Here's a biased link with an overview country by country: http://killercoke.org/
Here's Columbia's take: http://colombiajournal.org/colombia73.htm
Here's a British spin: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/ju ... r.colombia
Here's the wiki entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_ ... yee_issues

Then go google "Sweatshops" and see how many American companies are paying slave-wages to children in Vietnam, Mexico, Malaysia and other third-world countries.


If you'd like to pretend American companies are off-shoring out of the goodness of their hearts to share the wealth with developing nations and that it is a win-win for everyone, feel free.

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I sense a strawman in there...

Companies exist to make as much profit as they can for their shareholders. That is their primary duty. Anything that makes that easier is a good decision. Note that "their shareholders" are primarily middle class people - the core of society that make it run - trying to save enough to get their kids to university and for retirement. Therefore, if a company can save money by sending jobs offshore and get the same quality out of it, by all means, they should do so.

There are costs involved in sending jobs offshore, big costs, some of which never go away. If a union finds it cannot compete with labor in China despite those costs, perhaps they should rethink what their member's duties are actually worth.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Boeing is already using major assemblies that are constructed 'overseas'. If that counts as 'outsourcing' then they are already doing it.

Assembling aircraft assemblies is serious bizniss. We aren't making socks or t-shirts here. There are very strict safety and quality concerns.

Typical outsourcing to find cheap labor is probably not an option, because those types of environments are probably not conducive to building passenger airliners that meet FAA and Boeing standards.

There were a couple of labor walkouts at the Boeing assembly plants a few years ago. One was particularly long. This cost boeing a lot of business. They were unable to make deliveries on time, which resulted in cancellations, and there were many airlines who publically stated that they chose Airbus over Boeing because they were afraid Boeing couldn't deliver on time.

This is a problem. The company has to be competitive, and (apparently) can't do so under the current labor situation.

Which is why we need to pass laws that require airlines to buy Boeing airplanes.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is rather my point. They appear to be getting to the point where it is cheaper and easier to pick up and move than it is to keep dealing with the bloodsucking unions. (Even if it's only moving to South Carolina.) If the unions take it too far, it will end up easier to make airliners to FAA/Boeing Standards in Timbuktu than it is to do it in Washington state. Of course they'll probably be insolvent by then. But they're too big to fail, so the government will step in and buy them, and cave in to union demands, and run your deficit even higher.

Everything's gravy.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Well now that is the question isn't it? In the past Unions could justify higher wages because jobs were actually dangerous. Now however a factory job safety (in real numbers) is pretty to close to par with the rest of the non-manufacturing labor force.

http://www.experts123.com/q/are-employm ... rates.html

If the risk of injury and skill-level of someone putting five screws into a dashboard is the same as an order-taker at McDonald's should their pay be on par? I am ok with it. But bear in mind that will create more pressure to educate our workforce which will create a labor-glut on the skilled/educated positions which will drive pay down in those industries (Supply > Demand = falling prices).

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How on earth am I going to change my mind without being presented with a rational argument? As for your remark about calling names, when you compared yourself to Khross and his use of the Socratic method, the comparison was rather obvious; Socrates was known as the Gadfly of Athens because of his questioning. The comparison jumped out at me, but I guess you can take offense at whatever you want, even if you make the comparison yourself.



It appears that you are making the argument that the existence of unions is the sole reason for a high standard of living? Could you show me a country that has unions compared to a country that doesn't have unions in the same geopolitical region so I can see the difference? I wonder how many countries there are that have no unions.

Could you define "slave-wages" for me? I'd hate to think that you're using emotionally loaded words simply for their effect, not their substance. I would assume that slaves are paid nothing, so I'm kid of lost there.





Now that's interesting. I thought that the standard of living was low in these countries because they have no unions, yet the article about Colombia from the Colombia Journal explicitly talks about unions.



Could you define "sweat shop" for me, as again, I see it as an emotionally loaded word and I don't want to assume you're using it purely for its emotional quality.
Hmmm, the Human Development index shows Mexico and Malaysia as having a high level of human development. It would seem that the standard of living there is better than most. Could this be because there is employment in "sweat shops" available as opposed to no work?



I wonder where I presented this argument? Could you remind me? You're not creating an argument for me are you?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Slaves were typically paid half the product of their skilled labor, for example crafting metal.

Better?



You are right, these unions sound VERY powerful:



Better?



56 out of 169 countries? Low goal-post. Not to mention the study itself includes a 6 page caveat that goes into detail about why it's own data is not trustworthy:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_E ... eprint.pdf



What is your argument? If off-shoring is not occuring to spread the wealth, why is it happening?

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Usually the cost of doing business are lower. The reason for it being so can vary from country to country. I don't know what else to tell you without doing reasearch on every other country and all their resources and having an intimate knowledge of the business. There are a lot of things I don't know about running a factory of any kind in any business.

Just because one part of the world economy might be one way, doesn't mean it's true for everything. That's the fallacy of composition or some ****.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It doesn't matter I am done with this argument. We can argue back and forth as much as we want, but as you pointed out above it is not a one-dimensional issue. I personally believe that labor unions are a big reason America rose to greatness by ending quasi-indentured servitude (see the folk songs from the period: "Sixteen Tons", "Maggie's Farm", "John Henry" and "Casey Jones", also read Sinclair's "The Jungle"). The average American consumer doesn't care about the working conditions of Vietnamese factory workers so long as they can get Air Jordan's on the cheap.

As I said above though in response to Taly, that doesn't mean that I think labor unions are in the right. In the past automotive/steel/coal workers deserved higher wages because of the perils of their jobs (consider it hazard pay). Nowadays that is not so much the case. However, as someone else pointed out above, do you want the jet-airliner you are flying on to have been built by an illiterate 16 year old day laborers in Guatemala?

It is a trade-off and anyone who falls adamantly on either side of the issue is a fool. If all the unions disappeared tomorrow that's fine, the pendulum would swing further towards ownership and my belief is that eventually unions would rise again when the disparity is too great for common citizens to stomach.

Dilbert 1990:

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So if the company was not there what wages would they be getting and what would the standard of living be?

It seems you're extending correlation to causation.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Unfortunately, this is a common misconception. Not that large businesses are completely cherubic or anything, but "The Jungle" isn't the whole story. The business Sinclair wrote about was a small time operation that wasn't doing well, larger meat businesses had much better conditions. I wish I could remember where I read that so I could give some sort of source other details, but I can't recall. I'm not at home to sort through my books.

One of the benefits the brand name, when people started using them, is that a reputation quality is built around those things. The businesess usually try to maintain that image by keeping up the quality.

I don't know if I'd take political advice from Dilbert.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Yeah, somehow I don't believe you. If you can show this was "typical", I'd be impressed.

You're my slave I own a shop that makes chairs, and you can make chairs, for every six chairs you make I'll give you three - somehow that seems like a poor business model.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

If you'd define "jack-shit", yes.


So it's not having "no unions" that allow for a low standard of living, it's no powerful unions? Could you define what a "powerful" union is?


What is a "pittance"? Is it a pittance compared to what their peers are paid? Is it a pittance compared to what you are paid? Is it a pittance compared to what they would be paid with no job?

Again, if you could define "jack-shit" it would be helpful.


It might be seen as a "low goal-post" if the rankings from 1st to 169th were the point, but it's not. Russia and the Ukrain both fall below those numbers, are they what you would consider having a low standard of living? Compared to what? If 168 countries had an HDI of .91 and the US's rank remained as it is at .902, the US would be 169th out of 169 it would be really shitty to love there, right?

As for the "data is not trustworthy", I do't see them saying that in the link you provided. As a matter of fact, I see:

"Where reliable data are unavailable and there is significant uncertainty about the validity of data estimates, countries are excluded to ensure the credibility of the HDI and the HDR family of indices (see box 1)"

Then again, if you can show me a more reliable means to compare global standards of living, I'd like to take a look.

I'd be interested in what answer you might have to the most pertinent question I posed. I'll re-post it here in hopes of an answer:
Could you show me a country that has unions compared to a country that doesn't have unions in the same geopolitical region so I can see the difference?




I'm glad to see you're interested in what argument I may have. Using this exchange as the basis for which argument you are looking for:


My argument is this:
Stating that a company hiring people in another location because they are less expensive to employ than in a previous location is "corporate union-busting" implies that the primary goal of moving the jobs overseas is to destroy the union. It is much more plausible that moving the jobs overseas is a decision made to increase the profitability of the company by lowering their costs. It seems silly to assume they're doing it for some nefarious purpose such as "corporate union-busting" when the more simple answer is that they're doing it to increase profitability -Occam's razor and all. How are you so convinced that it is otherwise?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko