Which states will be "right-to-work" in 2025?

[pbrower2a]

If the Republicans fully consolidate power in 2017, all states will be "Duty-to-Starve" states by federal law.

[pbrower2a]

Probably one of the saddest maps that I've seen in a while. It's amazing how many people have been brainwashed into thinking that unions are a negative thing.

Unions have proven themselves to be a bad thing. Closed-shop laws were shady from the get-go, but the incompetence of unions has made closed-shop intolerable.

Most American unions aren't actually unions anyway. They are often just greedy capitalist organizations who hate the market-value of the labor they represent. They are falling apart for a reason. It isn't a conspiracy.

The Master Class simply wants all but themselves to suffer for their unrestrained greed. More profit through longer hours for less under brutal working conditions -- that's the fascist way. Don't fool yourself: fascism will be no better in America because it is American than a tornado will be better than one that strikes outside of America because it is an American tornado.

[pbrower2a]

I hope nationally right to work on the federal level is the law of the land.  I want to return to the Calvin and Grace Coolidge days.

I have never hated things more than I hate labor unions…

1920s -- a slum of a decade, an era of corruption, mindless hedonism, social stasis, and destructive speculation. Coolidge kept the screws tight on German reparations, which harshened economic conditions in Germany -- which may have led to one of the greatest political disasters of inhuman history, the rise of Adolf Hitler. 

Labor unions give workers a stake in capitalism; without them workers get stepped on so often and so hard that working people might as well have Karl Marx as their savior. 

[pbrower2a]

Hopefully all of them, and public sector unions will have been strangled to death.

Unions made the American dream possible. It is telling that Nazi Germany quickly destroyed independent trade unions and turned German workers into serfs in all but name, as they were unable to change jobs except with the consent of their employer and could be sent to brutal labor camps in which they toiled to exhaustion on starvation rations if they faltered or showed any signs of dissent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness became irrelevant in the worker's Hell that was the Third Reich.

Indeed the bulk of the inmates of Nazi labor camps in the mid 1930s were workers who failed to meet production quotas or other demands of the plutocrats who profiteered from slave-labor conditions. Of course Nazi Germany was more infamous for its military aggression, its brutal suppression of dissent, its destruction of independent thought, and above all else mass murder. But maybe we need to remember that such labor camps as Auschwitz (it was intended to work people to death, and people unfit for labor were 'selected' for quick murder) got their start in the labor camps in which the only means of exit were either to endorse plutocracy at its absolute worst or die.

When the Americans, British, and French liberated northwestern and southern Germany they quickly authorized the organization of labor unions. The western Allies trusted working people more than they trusted even the educated elites and small-business who had often been corrupted.     

 

[pbrower2a]

I have never hated things more than I hate labor unions…

1) Why? 2) Do you got a job?

Labor unions are a distortion of capital being connected with human resources. They inflate (artificially) what these workers are worth and they distort the market. More often than not, unions try to force membership on whole groups of people to increase their bargaining power. You can't enter some jobs without joining the local union - and paying union fees - which I find inherently anti-democratic. And lastly, by paying union dues, I'm indirectly subsidizing the Democratic Party, a Party I am most definitely not interested in supporting or subsidizing. them.

Why does the job bit matter by the way? I'm between jobs at the moment, but even if I had one, I don't want to work for a union and give union dues to one.

Employers have told me that they prefer to negotiate individually with workers so that they can reward people based upon their merits. In practice that means something very different: finding the weaknesses of negotiation of individual workers and exploiting those as much as possible. Supervisors are expected to spy upon their subordinates to find any possible vulnerabilities. At times having a vulnerability means getting a pay cut, let alone getting subpar pay.

Thus a scenario like this is possible.

Bill's wife has a baby. His boss congratulates him and then tells him that since it is in the best interest of Bill and his enlarged family that he take a pay cut on behalf of the security of his job. Oh, yes -- and do some unpaid overtime.

Collective bargaining, something that unions can offer, is well worth the union dues. Don't fool yourself: that is what Big Business hates about unions. 

 

[pbrower2a]

@Cal: Yeah, and the black vote then was like the Asian vote WWII, one token minority to prop on.

Last I checked your Cal also heckled the Irish to hell like every other GOP big-head, while the Democrats had Al Smith. Also the GOP lacked pretty much any type of religious vote that wasn't Protestant.

Also the GOP never officially denounced the Klan either, not since Grant, yes there were token speeches by Harding and Teddy,but only them and them alone. 1924 Democrats at least considered it.

The Klan dominated Republican politics in Indiana in the 1920s.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

If it is by State action, then Wisconsin is next. The Koch family regent Scott Walker has stated his desire to transform Wisconsin into a cheap-labor state. Kentucky and West Virginia? Anyone who does is going to have big trouble with the United Mine Workers.

Ultimately whether labor unions are even allowed to exist will be a decision of federal legislation. I would not be surprised if the GOP tries to bring up a federal Duty to Starve
law in the next Congress. President Obama will veto it every time. 2017? Sure -- if the Republicans elect a President and maintain control both Houses of Congress. In such a case America becomes a highly-centralized, monolithic absolute plutocracy until the government is overthrown.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I don't know whether you think that there is a recycling of historical trends at roughly the span of a long human lifetime, but there's a good reason for the worst tendencies in human nature in any time resembling those of something like eighty years. Figure that the children born in the early 1920s associate the Great Depression with a cause in reckless speculation and an anything-goes attitude toward Big Business did everything possible to prevent a recurrence of such folly even if it tempted younger people. Whether one was a liberal like Abraham Ribicoff or a conservative like Bob Dole one resisted the shady finance that looked like late-1920s folly so long as one could. Around 2000 people like them were out of public life. The temptations of shady finance and weak regulation of hustles in the securities business were always there,but around 2000 nobody was around to stop either. By 2005 the stage was being set for a 1929-style crash.

The extinction of child memories of an event makes a repetition of folly that leads to a near-repeat of a similar catastrophe all the more possible.

http://blog.lifecourse.com/

This may be interesting, and I post heavily there. Elections are a big part of American history, and generational differences are a big part of electoral demographics.