Why is Lexmark obligated to retain these workers? Instead of asking companies to exercise morality out of their own decency, I'd rather be sure via mechanism. Lexmark is paying above minimum wage. Isn't it minimum wage that's the problem?
In the US, labor protections have been continuously eroded since at least the 80s, as the US Republican party has worked tirelessly (and overtly) to promote corporate interests at the expense of workers, and the Democratic party has often joined them without advertising it (for both parties, that’s where the money is).
On an international scale, international agreements, including both bilateral agreements & large multilateral treaties and various trade deals, erode state sovereignty replacing local worker protections with unaccountable judicial and quasi-judicial arbitrators who tend to side with corporations against consumers or workers, and sparking a race to the bottom when it comes to all sorts of national regulations.
For individual companies, there’s no downside in ignoring any unregulated external harms to workers, consumers, the environment, etc., right up to the point where a scandal gets so big that it sparks mass boycotts. The “free market” is utterly incapable of self policing, and as citizens we should continue to fight in our separate republics for systems which clamp down on corruption and abuse.
In Mexico in particular, the government is weak and corrupt, relies excessively on oil money for revenue, and has been fighting a war against drug cartels across half the country; enforcing better wages and working conditions is far from their top priority.
More concretely, I think the market mechanism has its place, but I think states need a diversity of economic power & political representation, a reasonable level of wealth/income equality (far more than the current USA at any rate), enough enforced transparency to catch fraud and corruption, and widespread civic engagement at every level from neighborhoods on up, so that political discourse stays informed and productive and the interests of the few aren’t able to trample on the basic rights and needs of the many.
State supported markets and money and property rights are tools, not ends in themselves. Their purpose is to efficiently allocate resources and encourage innovations, so that the economy continues to produce the infrastructure and goods we need to support human flourishing, not to build feudal empires for wannabe aristocrats. At the point they stop serving their proper purpose, they should be guided back by additional institutional structure.
There was no currency printed for TARP (the Treasury can't print money; that's the Federal Reserve's domain) - it was financed via the sale of T-notes/bills/bonds. The government issued debt to raise the TARP money, and the rate of return on the assets purchased with that debt has exceeded the yield on Treasury securities, resulting in a net real profit.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-10-20/bailout-of...
It's really how it has to be. Collective bargaining ultimately stifles innovation. It's really hard to come up with new business concepts if there's this giant body of law, regulation, and tradition that governs every way someone can contribute to an economic venture. I personally would hate for web development to become a unionized field, ultimately that would reduce my options rather than increase them. Every job becomes pretty much the same.
Given a choice between US-style employment and European-style, I'd pick US. There is a lot I can do to alter the terms of my employment. I can contract, start my own firm that hires only me, I can accept full-employment and negotiate perks. No relationship is unalterable and sacrosanct. To put it succinctly, I prefer to retain my bargaining ability rather than delegate it to someone else.
Obviously I have a very privileged position in society and the less-privileged would probably choose more stable unionized jobs. But I wasn't born rich. I didn't graduate college. My options really do come from the society I live in rather than the circumstances of my birth within that society.
The problem is that it's all or nothing, and once you start going in one direction, it's really hard to turn the ship around. I think ultimately Anglo-style fungibility of labor will, over time, find market solutions to the problems of the lower class, and not have to resort to political solutions except to retain worker mobility.
Freedom of information makes it really hard for abusive practices to stay in the shadows, and also allows the social norm to shift over time. It offers most of the advantages of collective bargaining without the stifling political intrusion. So we get a pendulum effect in which things get worse in one direction, but public attention forces things to get right again, and everybody benefits from the norm shift.
I enjoy being skilled as a software developer, but it's still not relatively as good as it was in the mid-late 70's accounting for inflation. The problem is we have a lot of pro-business combined with protectionism that inhibits the pro-competition that's meant to offset monopolistic tracks.
My company's IT personnel are all full-time employees, with decent salaries and medical coverage. I'm actually underpaid relative to my peers, but I've managed to negotiate certain perks that are pretty important to me.
But social inequality has always existed, you have to compare rungs on the ladder to what those rungs looked like 10-20 years ago. I'd argue that if you look at it that way, life is only getting better and better for people.
The union movement was a response to a particular time frame where the world was rapidly industrializing and the nature of work was very different than it is today. Factories used to lock the doors during the workday so workers couldn't sneak out. That period of time is over.
> Unions are for those that don't have your bargaining position.
This is not true at all. There are player's unions for each of the major sports. In Hollywood, entrance into your profession's union is a key marker of status and increases your earning potential, so long as you do it right. The medical field has professional organizations that act as unions.
There are unions for each of the construction fields as well as a substantial non-unionized sector. Both sectors cater to different parts of the market.
In all fields and sectors in which collective bargaining is a thing, innovation is stifled. Professions remain static, decade after decade, the union doing its damndest best to keep the status quo.
> And there's a difference between "I wasn't born rich" and making it and "I'm born into a deprived circumstances."
I was 1 step away from what they call "poor white trash." My mom's parents struggled a lot, and though my father's father had a stable union job with the railroad, my father was an alcoholic. My mom threw him out when I was around 3 or 4 and we were the very definition of poor. My mom has told me numerous stories of the ugliness of the people and the near-desperation in which we lived most of the time.
I don't remember much of it because my mom managed to escape the hell of southern Louisiana by marrying a Marine. Soon after, he got posted to various other parts of the country, and south Louisiana was ancient history.
I was born into the so-called 'working poor'. We didn't stay that way. Hell, south Louisiana didn't stay that way, it's a lot different now. It wasn't cushy union jobs that did it, it was the willingness to be mobile and to take advantage of the economic opportunities that being in the most powerful nation of the world afforded us.
>Discontent among its workers had been brewing for months, with reports of harassment, unfair wage deductions and unsafe work conditions as well as poor wages.
So this guys organize, demand a raise, and when it was denied call for a strike. Most people that was fired is precisely the same people that had signed formal paperwork to get a union started. The government agency in charge of seeing it through was legaly bounded to keep the list private until after the process was completed, yet the names were mysteriously leaked and the union busted before it had a chance to get started. They never had a chance.
I know people around here are pretty much anti-labour, so I am goint to explain in terms you can empathize with. Imagine your startup was hit by a pattent troll. You hire a lawyer, go to court and there you find out the pattent troll has mysteriously prepared to counter your whole strategy, as if they knew all the private stuff you had revelead in confidence to your lawyer.
It's not about the 35 cents, as it would not have been about whatever royalties the troll was demanding. It is about being stabbed in the back by the very people that was supposed to defend your case.
We should depend on mechanisms, not decency.
It's like when Ron Paul says we don't need government subsidies in healthcare because in his day, physicians helped people out of decency. Like we should depend on that for policy?