"Oh now that it's white people dealing with drugs, it's a crisis. America is so racist".
That's a load of crap on so many levels. I hope we figure out our next chapter here as a society.
To take one example, the media and politicians have put a huge spotlight on the plight of coal and manufacturing job losses, while only recently did we learn that in fact we're losing even more retail jobs. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/the-sil...
Want to guess at the racial and gender makeup of those manufacturing jobs vs. retail?
Manufacturing and coal towns are isolated. Manufacturing and coal are sometimes literally the only fields with jobs available in those towns.
Retail is generally located in places with many opportunities
Should they be able to? Absent some kind of deliberate regulatory or collective-bargaining action to prop up the price of labor in a given category, I assume the prevailing wages tend to reflect an implicit agreement between employers and potential employees on what that labor is worth. What is the argument for propping up the price of labor beyond what people are willing to do it for?
Or, put another way, what is the argument for why jobs should be seen as existing for the sake of giving workers enough money to live on, rather than as existing because some people want certain things done and are willing to pay a certain amount to have them done? In the second case, the value of having certain things done is not infinitely variable: some actions will create x value in the world, and can only be worth doing if they cost <x to do. Requiring that those actions be paid >=x will simply mean that those things will cease to exist. Is it a better world if we regulate out of existence those jobs whose performance is worth less than a family-supporting wage?
As for wage floors killing jobs, the effect would depend on the height of the floor. Modest increases in the minimum wage have had practically no effect on employment, but I'm sure massive hikes would cause problems.
I'm not convinced that propping up the price of labor directly follows from your point 1), which I do of course agree with. It seems better to me that the government do what it can to encourage the creation of jobs that are valuable enough to support living wages, rather than mandate that jobs which are not valuable enough to do so cannot legally exist. The former, I think, encourages creativity and the development of new possibilities, while the latter restricts freedom and limits the diversity of the economic ecology.
My (naive) guess would be that retail is a less-skilled job, so attempts by labor-groups to make themselves a controlled source of labor supply are easily circumvented by the readiness with which those jobs can be filled by nearly anyone. Whereas manufacturing jobs that involve some degree of skill are more able to corner the market on their own labor, and thus better able to negotiate from a position of power.
1. Retail involves large numbers of part-time workers, making the workforce harder to organize.
2. An idle factory is incredibly costly to the owners. Factory workers have more leverage.
3. Employer hostility/union breaking efforts, you need only spend a few minutes on google to find some nasty stories about wally world or your least favorite retail chain.
4. Lack of identity: if the last few years have taught us anything, it should be that people in manufacturing clearly have integrated their jobs into their identity. You can see programmers et al doing the same thing right here on HN every day. I doubt most people in retail consider "working in retail" to be an important part of who they are in the same way factory workers or programmers might.
5. Men ("breadwinners") have historically worked in manufacturing and women have historically worked in retail, lack of focus on retail historically by organizers
A more interesting question that "Why is it hard to unionize retail?" is "Why is it hard to unionize programmers?" I don't have as many good answers for that one. #3 is the only one which applies to programmers.
Yes, if you're of the "drugs should be legal" perspective. Revenge isn't justice.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-sessions-vows-to-ramp-up...
But... can you explain why it's a load of crap to point out that this crisis of despair and drugs and early death is being treated differently than previous ones that mostly affected blacks and other minorities? Reporters could have written awfully similar articles about hopelessness in the inner city at just about any point in the past few decades, and at least a few of them did, but society's response wasn't "Oh no, how could we have let this happen? How can we give them hope and a future worth living for?" as it is in this case, but rather the War on Drugs and mass incarceration and police militarization and condemnation of black culture (and many other minority cultures).
To be clear, I'm absolutely not advocating for white, rural America to be targeted by no-knock raids and public blame for its own predicament! I think that "How can we help?" should be the response to all crises like this. But we as a society are still heavily invested in the War on Drugs and a whole host of other forms of structural racism. So yes, I'd be a lot more comfortable with this treatment of the drug crisis facing white communities if it were going hand in hand with a similar reevaluation of the parallel challenges facing minority communities as well. But it's not.